


Renegades

by eirabach



Series: Renegades [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Enchanted Forest, Alternate Universe - No Curse, Captain Hook | Killian Jones/Bar Wench Emma Swan, F/M, Gen, Minor Character Death, Mutual Robbery, No Curse AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2017-01-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 08:56:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 40,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8156440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eirabach/pseuds/eirabach
Summary: They all start the same way, these stories we tell our children, with the words “once upon a time,” and the promise of a happy ending. They tell of a land far, far away, where there lived a beautiful princess, hair as dark as ebony, lips red like a rose, and a prince so charming it became his name.They spin tales of a war fought against a terrible witch, and how the heroes won. They tell us of the witch locked away forever as the princess’s womb grew round with child, and how the whole kingdom celebrated the victory of hope, and heroism, and True Love.They all start that way, they all end this way.All, that is, except this one.





	1. Throw the First Punch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seastarved](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seastarved/gifts).



> For seastarved, for being the best, and with unending gratitude to spartanguard for the beta - all remaining errors are entirely mine.

 

_They all start the same way, these stories we tell our children, with the words “once upon a time,” and the promise of a happy ending._

_They tell of a land far, far away, where there lived a beautiful princess, hair as dark as ebony, lips red like a rose, and a prince so charming it became his name._

_They spin tales of a war fought against a terrible witch, and how the heroes won. They tell us of the witch locked away forever as the princess’s womb grew round with child, and how the whole kingdom celebrated the victory of hope, and heroism, and True Love._

_They all start that way, they all end this way._

_All, that is, except this one._

 

* * *

 

The castle heaves and shudders under the vicious assault as the Royal Council gathers, all wide eyes and pale faces, in the crumbling sanctuary of the throne room. Their prince staggers in, palest of all, wearing a smear of crimson blood across his shirt and a smile that looks like heartbreak.

“It’s a girl,” he announces to a room full of tremulous smiles and plaster dust, and the youngest woman cries out, a hiccuping sob, as he’s followed by his wife in a bloodied nightgown - leaning hard on the arm of a small man - with a pink-red bundle gathered close to her chest.

Her face is tear-streaked, the exhaustion of childbirth clear in the sheen of sweat on her brow, but she straightens herself as her husband takes her arm and surveys the scene with the hard eyes of a queen.

“What’s happening?”

“The bridge is destroyed,” says an older woman, her fingers bunched in the red cape of the girl who’d cried out. “Her forces have us surrounded. There’s no way out.”

“Her forces,” spits a bearded man. “Since when did she get forces? She’s supposed to be locked up! How the hell did she get out?”

“So there’s no hope?” The princess’s knees buckle under the weight of her own words, and the babe lets out a whimper at the combined jolt of her mother’s fear and the shaking floor.

“Only one.”

The fairies approach like tiny stars, their light casting the council in a half dozen pastel shades thanks to the darkness of the magic pressing at the cracked windows. Their leader glows blue, and hovers over the pinched face of the baby before, in a flash of light, she appears before the princess as a woman.

“Blue,” she says, the relief and the fear clear in her voice, “what can we do?”

“Nothing,” says Blue with a sad shake of her head. “Regina is too strong; she will defeat us. But the child…”

“What about her?” The Prince has said nothing more, his concentration entirely on his wife and the child in her arms, but now he faces down the fairy, his face hard and his sword close at hand.

“We can take her from this place, hide her where Regina will never find her - will never know she exists.”

“Alone?”

“Snow White,” says Blue, her voice low and soothing, “you know the prophecy. The child must live. She is the only one who can defeat - ”

Snow sobs, nodding, but holds the baby impossibly tighter nonetheless.

“You’ll keep her safe?” The prince pleads, his eyes flickering from babe to fairy and back again, “You swear it? Always?”

“We’ll protect her,” says Blue, her wand coming to rest gently against the infant’s forehead. “You needn't fear. Now, what is her name?”

Despite everything, Snow smiles.

“Emma. Her name is Emma.”

 

* * *

 

Emma Swan knows the forest. She's lived here long enough recognise the creak of a branch in the breeze, or the warning crunch of leaves underfoot.

She knows pirates, too. Intimately.

They're not as sneaky as they think they are, for a start.

“We really should stop meeting like this.”

Her captive beams at her as he swings gently to and fro in the net, his shortened arm hanging useless at his side as Emma taps his confiscated hook against her lower lip.

“You’re pretty cocky for a guy who’s hanging six feet from the ground.”

He hums in agreement, picking at the ropes with the bejeweled fingers of his remaining hand, and offers her a devilish smirk.

“Believe me when I say, love, that this is quite the enjoyable form of hanging compared to what I’m usually faced with.”

Emma scoffs, and tucks the hook into the waistband of her stolen pants. “Why are you following me?”

“Following you?” He tsks sadly, shaking his head at her as if she’s the one who’s been caught out. “Don’t think so highly of yourself. You have something that belongs to me, and I’d like it back.”

She folds her arms and looks up at him with faux innocent eyes. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He opens his mouth to protest, but is stopped in his tracks by her raised brows. He laughs again, bitter this time.

“Ah, the innocent act.”

“Why mess with perfection?” she smiles, and he smiles back, a brief flash of something genuine in his expression before it’s replaced with the cold-calculation of a pirate captain.

“You’re wasted here,” he says. “Skills like yours are a valuable commodity, ones I’m sure I could,” he licks his lips and she tries not to watch the curl of his tongue, “make use of.”

“You’re disgusting,” she states blankly.

“I’m right though, aren’t I?” He leans forward until his face is pressed against the net, “There’s a little pirate in you, Swan.”

“Still disgusting.”

She turns to walk away, but before she’s made it more than four steps, there’s an almighty crash from behind her, followed by a sharp tug at her waistband and a large hand over her mouth. She throws her elbow back and bites down, tearing herself out of his grip as he jolts, and makes to run for it.

“Ah ah,” she hears over the snap of a flintlock being primed. “Not so fast.”

She turns slowly, defiance in her eyes even with the pistol leveled at her heart. “How did you get out of there?”

His eyes flick down to the net at his feet as if he’s surprised she even has to ask.

“Pirate, love.” He tilts his head, and offers her a lopsided smirk that could almost pass for apology. “Now, my property, if you please.”

“Any particular piece?” she snaps. “You’ve been particularly lax recently, Captain.”

Lax is hardly the word. She’d been looking for easier pickings - nefarious pirates aren’t her usual first choice of mark - when she’d stumbled upon the _Jolly Roger_ unloading crates upon crates of rich fabrics; chests that rattled with the sound of money as the sweating crewmen staggered down the gangplank; and jewels that Smee, drunk and laughing, had draped around the necks of the gathering fishwives as men with tar-streaked faces and gapped teeth tottered into the crowd with golden crowns atop their heads.

Whoever robbed him would have had an easy time of it, that’s for sure. It’s just that this time, it wasn’t her.

“You know what,” he spits, his eyes wild. “Now where is it!”

Emma looks at the steel of his eyes, the barrel of the pistol, the vicious glint of the hook that’s now hanging from his belt.

“I don’t have it,” she says, and the pistol doesn’t waver. “Whatever it is, I don’t have it.”

He stares at her along the barrel of his pistol for a long moment, and she wills herself to stare back, not to break eye-contact as he seems to read the truth behind her eyes.

“No,” he says, and she’s never heard him like this, can’t quite put her finger on the tone in his voice. “No, you really don’t, do you.”

He spins on his heel and leaves her with a sweep of leather, crashing back through the undergrowth like a blind chimera, and she wonders how she managed not to hear him approach until he’d had one foot in her trap.

It hits her at the same moment that she realises what that strange turn to his voice was, filling her with the oddest combination of glee, sadness, and fear.

It sounds like defeat.

All her breath seems to leave her at the realisation, rage simmering, hot and unexpected, at the tips of her fingers and in the space beneath her breastbone. She doesn't know how long they've been playing their game of cat and mouse. No idea how many moons have gone by since she snuck out of his cabin with a heavy heart and heavier coin purse.

She does know something, though.

Somebody is trying their luck at getting one over Captain Killian Jones, and Emma is not about to allow that to stand.

The only one who defeats him is her.

 

* * *

 

She’s always been good at finding people. That’s how she knew, as soon as she decided to help Captain Hook rediscover his lost treasure (and what a turn up for the books that is, for a start), just the right ears to whisper in, the throats to lean on to discover just who - apart from herself, of course - is foolish enough to rob from one of the most notorious pirates ever to drop anchor in the small port town. And once she finds that out, it’s hardly a hardship to sidle up to one of the king’s guards, no struggle in the easy way she laughs and flirts and flutters her lashes until they tell her exactly what she wants to know.

A pretty face can get you most anything in this town.

Jones - Hook -  is ridiculously easy to find, of course. She tries not to think too hard, too often, about why that might be.

She watches the men carouse from across the room. Their weapons have been propped against table legs and dropped under chairs since the drink began flowing, but even armed to the teeth, she doesn’t think they’re much to worry about now. It’s been four hours since they made port, and the younger, smaller members of the crew are already succumbing to drink. One of them is lying, sprawled and drooling, beneath the table where his Captain is holding court. The Captain is not drunk at all, as far as she can tell; his hands are certain as he caresses his female companions, which is both a pity and a pleasure. She does love a challenge.

Besides, she’s had him drunk and willing before.

The first time they’d met here had been different. She’d been new to this life then, still struggling to skin her hard-caught meals and limping from the blisters brought on from stolen boots. When a well-dressed woman had pressed a coin into her grubby hand one market day she’d almost thrust it back at her in horror; Emma Swan did not rely on charity, but then the silver had twinkled in her palm, whispering promises of a real bed, dry socks, a drink.

Oh gods, a _drink._

So she’d brushed the worst of the mud from her cloak and headed for the only tavern in town where her bedraggled appearance and ill-fitted corset wouldn’t be commented upon. And there, in the darkest corner of the poorest tavern in the docklands, was where she’d seen him.

She’d kept to the shadows as best she could, her face half-hidden behind her tankard of weak ale as she’d watched the patrons gradually sliding further and further into their cups, their singing becoming more slurred, their hands wandering more boldly over the bodies of the hard-eyed bar wenches.

She’d hardly noticed the presence beside her until his heavy breath was in her ear.

“Come here often, darlin’?”

She’d scooted away, her tankard held between them in a gesture of ‘no thank you’, but he hadn’t been dissuaded, leaning in and taking the tankard out of her hand, dropping it on the table before reaching a grubby hand towards her face.

“Pretty girl like you could use a real drink, I bet.”

She’d gritted her teeth, tightened her grip on her drink, and prepared for a fight, but then there’d been a tap at the man’s shoulder and he’d turned away.

“Not bothering the lady, are you, Tom?”

Tom, presumably her large and malodorous admirer, had shaken his head frantically.

“No sir, not at all, sir.”

Her rescuer had hummed lightly, and Emma had begun to crane her neck to try and catch a glimpse of him around Tom’s impressive bulk.

“How about you go see about getting your Captain another drink, hmm? I’ll be sure to keep the lady company.”

Emma had expected the larger man to balk at that - she certainly had - but instead he’d trotted away with the haste of a man aware of the consequences of disobedience, leaving Emma with a clear view of his Captain.

Tom wasn’t in the navy, that was for sure. The Captain was perhaps not as tall as his long leather duster made him look, but the hook he wore in place of a left hand screamed danger, an impression only furthered by the dark sweep of his hair, the bright blue of his kohl-rimmed eyes, and his startlingly handsome face. Emma was no stranger to danger, but even her internal warning bells were tolling terribly as he tilted his head to one side and looked down at her through ridiculous lashes.

“Mind if I join you, lass?”

Still, there was something almost disarming about the way he flopped down on the bench opposite, his smile a loose, careless thing as he pushed the goblet towards her, dark liquid slopping onto the tabletop.

“No reason to miss out on a drink now, is there?”

She took hold of it cautiously and sipped, coughing hard as the straight rum burned at her throat. Tom returned to the table to drop another goblet in front of his Captain before skittering away to where she could sense the other crew members watching them.

“Ah,” he said, his eyes twinkling over the rim of his own drink. “A little strong for the lady?”

She’d narrowed her eyes and taken another, deeper pull, the burn dissipating into her bones. He raised one eyebrow, and she let her tongue slip out to catch the droplet on her lips.

“Not a lady,” she’d said, and his smile had grown wider, teeth flashing white against the dark of his beard.

“Just as well.” He had held out his hand, and she’d tried not to let her eyes linger on the jewels in his rings. “Killian Jones. Not a gentleman.”

He’d proved himself a liar that night, in the dark confines and narrow bed of his cabin, when even through the haze of drink and the barest of acquaintances, he’d made her ache and shudder and cry out in ways she’d barely dared to dream of, but she’d told the truth. Though as she crept from his bed before dawn, his coin purse hidden under her skirts and her hideous stolen corset ripped beyond salvation, she’d almost wished she hadn’t.

It had been a week later that she’d found her forest home ransacked, a crude hook carved into the bark of the nearest tree and her loot long gone, and she’d felt the sting of betrayal hard enough to wait out his next return to port. An eye for an eye, she’d told herself as she’d tucked jewels into the lining of her skirts under the cover of darkness and poppy-infused rum, but she’d watched him slumber just the same.

She’d brought him a drink the next night, sent it over with a wench, her face and hair covered by a hood, and smiled as he lifted it in a toast to _the only woman to ever best me_.

But that doesn’t matter anymore. Things have moved on since then. This is business.

She waits for the crew to depart, tripping up the stairs in the company of eager women or staggering out into the street to seek out the sort of entertainment not on offer at a semi-respectable establishment like this. He stays behind, which some of his crew remark on with mild surprise - clearly, he is usually perfectly inclined to join them in their determination to catch the pox. She’s not surprised, though. This is a man she knows, after all, and what she knows is about to be worth his time.

“You again,” he sighs, resigned, as he drops onto the bench seat opposite in a woebegone echo of that long-ago night, resting his elbows on the table to demonstrate he’s unarmed apart from his hook. “come to relieve me of more of my plunder? Or are you finally willing to repay the debt you owe me?”

She wrinkles her nose, ready to snap back a retort if he starts any of his flirtatious nonsense, but then he drops his head to rest his chin on the curve of his hook and looks at her with tired eyes.

“What do you want, Swan?”

“What’s the matter with you?” she asks. “Am I keeping you from something? Important pillaging? Got a hanging to get to?”

“Alas,” he says with a roll of his eyes, “since somebody has seen fit to relieve me of all but my most meager possessions, I’m unable to resupply until my coffers are refilled.”

His eyes slip down to her waist where her coin purse lies hidden beneath the edge of her corset.

“Unless you’d care to make a generous donation to such a worthy cause?”

Emma crosses her legs, lifting her petticoats away from her ankle just far enough that he can see the flash of steel tucked against her leg.

“You can try if you like, but we both know how that ends.”

He nods in something like approval. “Very well. There’s a point to this visit, I take it?”

“I may have some information about your most recent losses. Apparently, there’s a group of men who’ve been asking about when you’d make port. They call them Black Knights. They work for the ruler of a kingdom north of here, a known witch by the name of Regina.”

“Aye,” he takes a long slug of his drink. “I’ve heard of her. A frightful woman, if the stories are to be believed. What of it?”

“They say she wants a dagger. A dagger belonging to a pirate captain with a hook for a hand and terrible personal security.”

Hook shakes his head, but his eyes flick away from hers and down to the left - a classic tell. “A man such as meself owns many weapons, Swan.”

“Not like this one,” she counters sharply. “They say it can be used to control the most evil creature alive.”

“And if I had such a thing, what on Earth does it have to do with you?”

“Oh I don’t know,” Emma almost preens. “Maybe because I’ve lifted my fair share of your loot? Maybe they think I’ve access to places they don’t.”

Her eyes flicker down to his mouth as she speaks, and she can’t help the way they follow the damp slide of his tongue across his lips as he considers her.

“If you were here as a honeypot, you’d be unarmed,” he says at length, and Emma scoots back on the bench, folding her arms in displeasure.

“Only if I was an idiot. You really think I’m working with them?”

He shakes his head again, his brow furrowing deeper the longer he looks at her.

“They’d send you to get me drunk, perhaps see if you couldn’t gain passage to more than the upper decks - what better excuse to enter the captain’s quarters than as an invited guest? What's a little betrayal between friends, anyway?”

"Oh, are we friends?" Emma says, before biting her lip, remembering in startling clarity her own visits to those chambers.

Hook’s eyes are far away too and for a moment, she allows herself to imagine that he thinks of that night the same way she does - a single bright moment in a lifetime of darkness - but then he drops his tankard to the table with a clatter, leaping to his feet with a face twisted into a snarl of fury.

“My fucking crew! Come on, Swan!”

She’s chasing him through the door and out into the night before the fact she’s following his orders has even registered in her mind.

 

* * *

 

Their first warning is the heap of bloodied clothing just feet from the door of the inn, a trail of brown-red blotches leading away in the direction of the docks. Hook gives the pile a firm prod with the toe of his boot and it groans pathetically.

“Useless bilge rat,” Hook spits. “What sort of a lookout were you keeping, eh, Jim lad? One on the arses of the wenches, or one on the bottom of a glass?”

“Cap-captain,” groans Jim. “They’ve come for the dagger.”

“Who?” Hook snarls, but Jim is past speech.

Emma thinks back to the faces she’d passed on her way to the tavern, second-guessing every jostled elbow, every half-hidden face.

She groans. “They must have followed me.”

Hook swears, bitter and loud, and storms away, Emma hot on his heels and barely sparing a glance for the unfortunate Jim.

“Is it true? Did you have it?” she gasps out as they bolt as fast the cobblestones will allow for the ship. “The dagger?”

“Aye.” He stops dead, just where the shadows of the dockside buildings end, and Emma almost barrels into the back of him. “Aye, I did. Years and years of searching and I finally had it in my hand. I thought you’d taken it and I - ”  He huffs out something that’s not joyful enough to be a laugh. “I might have killed you for it.”

“Glad I passed the opportunity up, then,” Emma grumbles. “So what’s with the panic?”

He turns slightly from where he’s been watching his darkened ship, and looks at her as if she may be stupid.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she bites out. “You’ve already lost it. The moment for round-the-clock guards has passed, surely.”

“It’s not quite as simple as you think, Swan,” he says, not unkindly. “I thank you for the clue as to the would-be perpetrators, but perhaps you’d best return to the tavern. The night is young, after all.”

Emma sniffs, and lifts her chin in the air. “I want to know what’s so special about this damn dagger.”

“No,” he says, almost frightening in his sincerity. “No, you don’t.”

The ship is eerily silent as they board, no sign of the night watchman or demand for their business blocking their way as they lower themselves through the half-open hatch that leads to the quarters below.

Hook storms down the narrow corridor while Emma trots along behind him, her skirts hitched to her knees in her efforts to keep up. There’s a dull yellow glow emanating from under the door of the captain’s cabin that sets Hook reaching for his cutlass, his face twisted in rage.

“What do you think you’re _doing_ ?” she hisses, grabbing at the sleeve of his coat. “You don’t even know who they _are_!”

“I don’t care if it’s the bloody King himself come to offer me a knighthood, Swan. This is my ship. No one boards her without my permission.”

“Except me, presumably some other thief, and whoever the hell that is? Come on, Hook. Think about this.”

“I have thought about it. I’m going to gut whoever’s in my cabin, then I’m going to have Smee keelhauled for keeping such a pathetic watch, and make the rest of the traitorous wretches stitch their own shrouds!”

“Do all your plans end in violence?”

“As a general rule,” he holds up his hook, letting the lamplight glint off the vicious tip. “Pirate, see?”

Emma rolls her eyes, “You don’t go in for tactics much, do you?”

“Got a better idea?” He lifts his eyebrow and tilts his head, waiting eyes fixed on her face as she shuffles on the spot. “No? Violence it is, then!”

He bursts into the Captain’s quarters with a cry and his cutlass drawn, Emma skidding in on his heels, her eyes flickering around for the first sniff of danger.

She's not sure what either of them were expecting, but it's fair to say it probably wasn't this.

The floor is slick with blood, a man lying starfished across the captain’s desk with his entrails on full display, and another half-draped over the bed, his throat slit wide in a macabre smile. Smee stands in the centre of it, his cutlass dripping blood and his eyes glassy.

“Smee!” Hook snarls, “You have exactly three seconds to explain the state of my quarters before I add your worthless corpse to the pile!”

Something tingles at the back of Emma’s neck, that sixth sense for danger that she’s always had mixed with something darker, more urgent. More evil.

 _Run_ , her brain urges her, _run, run run_.

She almost does, her hand reaching out to grasp Jones’ hook without even thinking, when she notices the wound in the middle of Smee’s chest, the slow creep of blood across his shirt as he begins to fall slowly, slowly forward.

She opens her mouth to scream, and the world goes dark.


	2. Lost Souls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holy Exposition, Batman! Or, banter and butchery.

Emma wakes with a splutter, retching helplessly as she spits acrid soil from her mouth. Her head is throbbing; there's a ringing in her ears so intense she feels like she’d been ten rounds with one of the bare-knuckle fighters that tout for matches in the back streets. In her confusion part of her wonders if maybe she has - she’s done worse things for money after all - and a concussion makes a hell of a lot more sense than any other explanation she can come up with for the turn her night has taken.

"What," she asks the universe as she sits up unsteadily, her fingers digging into the damp earth, "the hell just happened?"

The universe, such as it is, is pacing up and down in the small clearing they've found themselves in, his shoulders hunched, a flask held tight in white-knuckled fingers, his face drawn in a dark scowl as he grumbles bitter invectives under his breath.

"Hook!" Emma snaps as she struggles to her feet. The buzzing in her ears seems to run down her spine and along the lengths of her arms, leaving an uncomfortable burn in her fingertips. It makes her feel off kilter and unsteady. Afraid. She forces the fear down and plants herself in front of Hook, arms folded, and twists her expression into something she hopes looks appropriately fierce.

"What is going on? Where are we?"

Hook stops pacing, takes a long swig from his flask, and turns his dark glare on her.

"Magic," he spits.

Emma tries to rub the burn out of the skin of her upper arms, and lifts her eyebrows in question.

"What about it?"

"There’s witchcraft at work here, Swan. Can you think of any other manner in which a man can be torn from his own home and deposited," he pauses, waving his hook around in disgust, "in such a godforsaken place as this?"

"I don't know," Emma says, pulling a twig from her hair, "something more believable perhaps? Why would somebody use magic to send us here instead of just - oh I don’t know - killing us where we stand? Why would they even bother? What kind of fucking enemies do you have, anyhow?"

"Enemies? Darling," he half snorts. "You don't know the half of it. Death is the very least of my concerns."

"So you don't know who sent you here or where you are?" she asks, not having the time or the energy to ponder his choice of words too deeply. "Or more importantly, where I am? No clue whatsoever?"

The clearing they've found themselves in isn't large, Hook can cross it in six angry strides - a fact he continues to prove as she takes in their surroundings. It's dark and damp even on a clear night like tonight, the trees reaching for each other overhead, fronds of ivy dripping from their branches to leave the ground covered in a thick layer of mulch and rot.

Hook looks about briefly and groans, running his hand through his hair as he stares helplessly up into the canopy.

"That's the long and the short of it, aye. I'm sure I can navigate us back to civilization, but I'll need a little more sky before I can draw you a map, love.”

“So I'm stuck here?” Her voice trembles, just a little, and she hates it. “With you?”

“I'm terribly sorry your highness. No doubt you've plenty of important appointments, I hate to keep you from them. Unless," his eyes narrow again, and Emma feels the need to wipe her still tingling palms against the skirts of her dress, "you're exactly where you want to be."

"Don't flatter yourself," she grouses, but he doesn't smile, instead stepping closer until he's thoroughly inserted himself into her personal space.

"Hardly, Swan," he says. "It seems to me that you are the architect of our current predicament.”

“Oh yeah?” she snorts. “How d’you figure that?”

“Well,” he looks her up and down and she clenches her fists in an attempt to stave off the blush she can feel spreading across her cheeks. ”You are more of a bandit than a bar wench, are you not?”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

Hook smirks and lifts his hook, tapping it against his chin in a mockery of the way she’d taunted him when he was in her trap, and Emma feels her breath catch in her chest, suddenly feeling as if she’s missed ten pages in her own story.

“I told you to go home, did I not? Your insistence on following me could be either flattering or suspicious, don’t you think?"

"Well, yes, but - "

"And it was you who sought me out with information you had taken it upon yourself to find."

"Well - "

"In fact," he presses himself closer until she can feel his breath on her cheek, and she lifts her chin so that she can still meet his eyes, "without your input I may have had a delightful night in the company of a less troublesome lady or two, and returned to my ship in peace."

"Yeah," Emma says, "maybe. And maybe whoever ran Smee through would have been waiting up for you. Is that vest swordproof?”

Hook runs his hand over the front of his leather vest and frowns. "Aye. There is that."

"I'm sorry about Smee," Emma says, and finds she means it.

Hook says nothing, only rubbing his hand over his face for a moment before sighing deeply and stepping away.

“I didn’t ask you to follow me.”

“You didn’t have to,” she says before she can stop herself, panic rising in her throat along with the lift of his eyebrow.

“Emma - ” he begins, but she holds up a hand to stop him.

“Ugh, no. Don’t… don’t read anything into that.”

He grins, holding hand and hook out wide as he backs away. “You can’t blame a man for -”

“Stop!”

He drops his arms and stops dead, his face twisted in confusion or disappointment or anger or whatever, but Emma can’t see it. Her eyes are fixed on the ground at his feet, leaf mulch giving way to bare soil and a dark, curving streak that sets the hairs on the back of her neck on end.

“Keep still,” she hisses, “there’s something behind you.”

He immediately spins on the spot, his cutlass out and his hooked arm flung wide as if trying to keep her behind him.

“Yeah,” she grimaces, stepping around his half-baked attempt at protection, “not that sort of thing, hero guy. Look at the ground.”

They look down together at the dark line that curves in a semi-circle away from where they stand to disappear into the trees at the clearings edge, the dusky moonlight catching on what look like small crystals amongst the burnt and blackened soil.  

“You’re the woodsman here, Swan. What of it?”

She turns about the clearing, letting her fingers drag over the bark of the nearest trees, her eyes fixated on the burnt bare earth. But this isn't the place she sees.

She swallows hard against the memory of smoke in her throat, the way the bramble had torn at her shins as she’d run, run for her life as everything she’d ever known went up in flames at her back, magic shrieking through the air. For a moment she’s back there, screams ringing in her ears, her eyes squeezed shut in terror as her whole world fell apart and then -

Her eyes snap open to see Hook looking at her with something like concern.

“Something's wrong with this place.”

“What's wrong is dilly dallying about when night’s drawing on, Swan.” He tilts his head and offers her the smallest of smiles. “We’ve had an evening of it, perhaps we should make camp, aim to catch a few hours of rest before finding out where on earth we are.”

He makes to enter the circle, falling back with a strangled oof as she launches herself forward to drag him away.

“No,” she spits, rage she can't begin to understand rising in her chest and filling her voice with venom. “Not here. We need to find somewhere else.”

He looks at her in that searching way that she hates, but he makes no further moves into the ring of scorched earth.

“It’s a fairy ring,” she says, “or it was, once. It’s been destroyed, but the magic…”

“Magic cannot be destroyed,” Hook says, “only transformed.”

“Yeah,” Emma folds her arms, the tingling and buzzing from earlier returning the longer she stands here, “something like that. And I think we’ve had enough of magic for today.”

“Enough for a lifetime.” Hook says, already sheathing his cutlass. “You?”

Emma takes a last look at where the ring once lay, imagining how magic would once have sizzled and sparked within it, the shadows of the branches jittering in the moonlit breeze reminding her fiercely of dancing figures and laughter and death, death, death.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, let’s go.”

* * *

 

They find another clearing after only a short stumble, Hook spreading his arms in a mocking little bow as she enters.

“Will this suit, your highness?”

Emma scuffs her boot through the mostly dry leaf litter and scowls,

“You needn’t be like that. If you don’t believe me you can go back and sleep there. Be my guest. Close your eyes in that circle and see where you wake up - if you wake up at all.”

He lets his arms drop, his hands coming to rest on his belt buckle as he considers her.

“Worried the fae will come take me away are you?”

“No,” she bites out, “I can’t imagine what they’d want with you.”

He licks his lips and lifts his brows and Emma’s eyes almost roll out of her head.

“There was something not right about that place.”

“Aye well,” he says, “that would be the magic, as you said. It leaves a stench wherever it goes.”

“Dark magic does,” she says, and he shrugs, turning away and beginning to gather the driest twigs around them.

“In my experience, lass, there’s no other type.”

She can't quite disagree with that, not really, not with the memories of her last experience of magic gnawing at her edges, so she sets herself to work fashioning a vine into a simple trap the way she has done nightly for far longer than she cares to think about.

“Setting a trap?” Hook asks as he drops an armful of firewood into the centre of the clearing. “Should I be concerned?”

“Nah.” Emma pulls the last knot tight and smirks at him as she hangs the trap over her shoulder. “Pirates are too gristly for stew.”

He shakes his head and kneels to begin building the fire. “A day in your company is enough to shred a man’s ego to smithereens.”

“Because I prefer to trap supper than your pretty face?”

“Still pretty, though?” he smiles up at her and she feels the way she blushes. “I'll take it.”

“Piss off,” she says as she strides out into the forest, but the only heat behind it is the burning in her cheeks.

A rabbit is unlucky enough to find the trap and the point of her knife before too long, and she drops it unceremoniously in Hook’s lap when she returns to the side of the now roaring fire.

“I killed it, you skin it.”

Hook hums, holding the unfortunate beast up on his hook.

“This is terribly domestic, Swan.”

“Well don’t get used to it,” she says, dropping down to sit on a log that he’s dragged close to their fire.

Hook raises an eyebrow. “Why, so bored of my company already?”

“I didn’t want it in the first place.”

He grins, and his teeth flash white in the firelight. “Ah, now, we both know that’s not true.”

Emma stretches and groans, dropping her chin onto her hands as she glares at him out of the corner of her eye. “Not this again.”

He holds out his hand for her dagger, wriggling his fingers as she hesitates.

“Distrusting, aren’t you?”

“Hungry, actually,” she grimaces, handing the dagger over and turning away as he begins to butcher the rabbit, “and maybe regretting some of my most recent life choices.”

He pauses, and gives her an infuriatingly knowing look that makes her want punch it right off his face.

“Would you believe I don't think that's quite true? You still haven’t told me why you chose to follow me.”

He saws away at the rabbit until its skin lies about it like a macabre blanket, the wet red of its flesh reminding her of the sheen of the mans guts back on the Jolly.

It's almost enough to put her off her supper.

“I like adventure.” She deadpans.

He grins, a spot of rabbit’s blood glistening on his chin. “Just as well. I like you too, Swan.”

“Piss off.”

He grins, clearly delighted, and she shucks her filthy cloak, chucking it away from the fire in just such a way that the edge catches the back of his head.

“Do you think it was her?”

Hook doesn't look up from where he's maneuvering their supper into the flames. “Who?”

“Regina. The Evil Queen, or whatever her name is. Do you think she was the one who sent us here?”

Emma herself hadn't been able to drag her eyes from the dead and dying, but that didn't mean Hook hadn't seen something that had set him on the path of blaming magic.

“Perhaps,” he says, but he sounds unsure.

“Do you think she took the dagger?”

“If she did then she'd have little reason to be on my ship now, would she?”

“True, I guess. So who does have it then?”

“Alas, if I knew the answer to that question I suspect all of tonight’s events could have been avoided.”

He sounds exhausted, and she thinks back to the panicked, half wild way he'd accused her of stealing it in the first place.

“How did you get it? If it’s as powerful as they say how did you end up with it in the first place?”

He grins, but it doesn't meet his eyes. “Would you believe piracy?”

“Very funny.”

“Not exactly.” He shakes his head, looking down into the fire. “What would you say, Swan, if I were to tell you that I've lived nigh on three centuries in a land where time has no meaning and boys rule as kings, just for the opportunity to have a hope of one day getting hold of that dagger?”

Emma blinks at his sincerity, at the urgent way he looks at her as if her answer is somehow more important to him than she could ever grasp.

“I'd say you were mad,” is all she manages, and he smiles and shakes his head as he pokes the rabbit carcass further into the flames.

“And you'd be right. I've driven myself half insane with the need to make him pay. To hold that dagger in my hand and bring him to his knees before me.”

She watches the way his jaw twitches and the way the firelight intensifies the shadows in his eyes.

“You really do hate him, don’t you? This Dark One.”

He barks out a laugh, and looks down at his hook, turning it this way and that so that it’s burnished red by the fire.

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“It just seems weird, I guess. I mean, you’re not exactly a nice guy.”

“One doesn’t have to fit into your narrow definition of a ‘nice guy’ to see the evil in others, Swan.”

“What did he do to you?”

“Why,” he says lightly, but the light doesn’t reach his eyes, “he made me who I am, of course.”

It’s not quite an answer, even though it is.

“Tell me?”

“It’s not much of a bedtime story.”

She huffs, scooching herself closer to him and enjoying the way he seems to stiffen as she wriggles her way into his personal space. “Good job we’re not going to bed then.”

“No? Such a pity,” he says, but he doesn’t relax into the innuendo the way he usually does, all smarm and smirk. Instead Emma gets the distinct impression that he’d like her to leave the subject well alone.

“Jones.”

He jolts slightly at the use of his real name, before tugging his arms free of the enormous leather greatcoat he wears.

“You’re going to distract me by stripping?” Emma snipes, “I think you’ve forgotten you haven’t got anything I’ve not seen before.”

He scoffs lightly at that, allowing his coat to pool around his legs and looking at her just long enough to drop a knowing wink her way.

“Oh, I beg to differ. However, if you really want to know - “ he pulls at his shirt cuff with his hook, pulling it up until she can see red and black splashes inked into his skin. “Her name was Milah. He killed her.”

Emma swallows, her fingertips twitching with the urge to run over the lines of his tattoo, to feel whether the skin is raised under the sharp lines of the dagger, if the pale skin around it is as soft as it looks.

She tries to think back to that night in his cabin - had she seen it then? Had she seen another woman’s name carved across his arm as she worked her way down his chest? Had this Dark One’s dagger been pressed to her hip as his hand had sent her soaring?

It must have been. She tries not to think about why that stings.

There's a long pause where all Emma can hear is the crackling fire and her own racing thoughts. What is she doing, sitting out in the woods gods knows where with a man who’s done gods knows what? She's seen him naked, knows the sounds she can pull from him, watched his eyes glaze and his muscles shudder, and yet now, sitting here, he in his shirtsleeves and she in a dress more tear than fabric, she feels something a little like fear prickle at the base of her spine.

There are all sorts of dangers in the woods, she thinks wildly. Some are more threatening than others.

Maybe he senses something about her change in mood, or maybe hunger just gets the better of him, because he whips their supper from the fire with the point of his hook and lays it on the leather of his coat between them.

“Eat up then, love,” he says, suddenly cheery, “fit for a princess this!”

She pulls the meat from the bones with her fingers and wrinkles her nose at him.

“I'd be a terrible princess,” she says, and then proves her point by stuffing as much meat as she can manage in her mouth and beaming widely at him.

“I don't know. I've met my share of princesses and none of them had such refined table manners as that.”

“Ha ha.”

They eat in companionable silence for a while, but one rabbit doesn't spread far and the night draws on colder until Emma finally admits defeat and fetches her cloak, rolling it tightly around her as she shuffles as close to the fire as she dares.

“If you rob me when I'm sleeping,” she warns, “and leave me here, I will make the Dark One look like your well meaning maiden aunt. Are we clear?”

“Crystal. But perhaps in return you can do me one favour?”

Emma raises her eyebrows. “Not robbing me and leaving me for dead is a favour now?”

Hook shrugs. “Still a pirate, love.”

“Whatever.” She snuggles down into her makeshift bed. “Go on then, shoot.”

“You tell me you're no princess, not even a lady, but tell me. How did a woman like you end up living a life like this?”

She would bristle at the question, at the implied sympathy, the pity, but that's not what she sees when she looks at him. Instead she sees genuine interest, curiosity, and something so soft she doesn't know what to call it at all.

She'd have preferred the pity.

“Just your regular orphan stealing to survive, living in the wilderness with only the birds to talk to, you know how it is.”

She shrugs, an attempt at a brush off, but that soft look stays fixed.

“Aye, that I do.” Hook says gently. “More than you realise I wager. Tell me, just who are you, Swan?”

She scoffs, and burrows deeper into the folds of her cloak.

“Wouldn't you like to know.”

He smiles, a small thing but it serves to stoke the fire in her veins til she's forced to look away.

“Perhaps I would.”

“Yeah,” she half breathes, staring out into the comforting dark of the forest. “Perhaps I would, too.”

* * *

 

Torchlight captures the way the woman’s mouth twists and her hands clench at her sides as she storms her way through the castle. Men in full armour cower away at her approach, but she pays them no mind. She’s only looking for one man - the one locked away at the end of the labyrinthine corridors who sits cross-legged on the dirt floor with all the regal bearing of a king upon a golden throne. Her approach doesn’t rouse him in the least, his face a picture of disinterest as she throws herself bodily against his bars.

“Something bothering you, Dearie?”

“You!” She snarls. “You lied to me! We had a deal!”

The man looks up. His skin is scaled and glows like burnished gold and his eyes are wide, wide and cold and enough to strike fear into the hearts of most mortal men. The woman doesn’t fear him though, doesn’t cower before him. Instead she rattles at the bars of his prison, her rage swelling and cresting off her in waves as he offers her a small, cold smile.

“Oh dear, oh dear. Am I to presume things did not quite go according to plan?”

“You told me the pirate had the dagger,” she hisses. “You swore.”

“Did I?” He shrugs one leather clad shoulder. “The future is a funny thing, Regina. Perhaps he has yet to discover it. Perhaps he’s better at burying his treasure than you think. Perhaps,” and he rises, standing so that he can press his face close to hers through the bars, “you were beaten. Again.”

She pushes back from the cell with a growl, and the man tuts with something that might sound like sympathy on anyone else’s tongue.

“I should thank you nonetheless. The pirate’s death brings me almost enough joy to make up for these drab quarters and that slop you call food.”

Regina offers him a simpering smile. “Oh, is that what you wanted to hear? I’m so sorry. He’s not dead. He got away.”

The man tuts again, without the note of mock sympathy, and shakes a finger at her. “You’re losing your touch. A common renegade shouldn’t have caused you any trouble. I’m starting to think I should have thrown in my lot elsewhere.”

Regina curls her painted lips into a well-practiced sneer. “Thrown in your - I captured you, remember. You work for me now, Dark One.”

The Dark One smirks.

“If you say so, Dearie.”

Regina grits her teeth and turns to leave, stopping to look over her shoulder as the Dark One taps a long fingernail against one of the iron bars.

“What?” she spits.

“The pirate,” says the Dark One, “how did he escape you?”

“Magic.” she smiles snidely. “Perhaps you’re the one who underestimated him, not me.”

She turns away again, but he shouts after her, something different, desperate, in his voice that makes her pause, perfect eyebrows rising.

“Alone?”

“No,” she says as she walks away. “He was with a woman.”

The Dark One slides down the bars, his long fingers fumbling in the pocket of his tunic and pulling free a torn and yellowed piece of parchment.

“Em-ma,” he says, and smiles.


	3. Rebels and Mutineers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for some implied (attempted) sexual assault in this chapter.

When dawn breaks through the trees her cloak is sodden and cold, the fire long burnt out to ashes, and she’s alone.

He’s gone, the bastard. Upped and left like the pirate he is, the man he is, the living fucking creature he is, he’s left her to fend for herself just like everybody, _everybody_ , and -

Emma takes a deep, shuddering breath, scrubs her fists over her shamefully burning eyes, and then lifts her chin a little higher, holds her shoulders a little straighter. She’s not going to cry over Captain _fucking_ Hook. This is not going to be the one that breaks her. No way.

It hurts just the same though.

She lets out her frustration by kicking dirt over the remains of the fire, scattering a few leaves about so as to fool anybody with an inclination to follow her. It’s an old habit - pointless, probably, being followed is pretty much the opposite to her usual problem - but it brings a little cold comfort, covering over the cinders and burying the memory of last night right along with them.

“Did the fire do something in particular to offend you, or are you always this cheerful of a morning?”

She almost jumps out of her skin, spinning on the spot and staring, stupefied, at where Hook is standing, large as life and twice as obnoxious, his arms filled with material and his eyebrow sky high.

“You,” she says, half delighted, half aghast, and he nods.

“Aye. You were expecting perhaps the Queen of Sheba?”

“I thought you’d left.”

There’s nothing accusatory in her voice, only pure shock that he’s here - that he left and _came back_ \- but he flushes pink at the tips of his ears nonetheless.

“Would you prefer me to leave?”

Her mouth opens and closes wordlessly for a few moments, and he holds out the fabric like some sort of sacrificial offering.

“I brought you some dry clothes, if that helps?”

She wills her heart to stop beating so furiously and manages to take the bundle from him with mostly steady hands.

“When you say brought - ” she says, shaking out a long woolen cape and a chemise that looks like it may actual have seen the inside of a wash bucket some time in the past six months.

“Liberated,” he says, smiling. “Thought it would be good practice.”

She eyes him suspiciously. “For what?”

“Piracy,” he grins.

Almost against her will, she finds herself grinning helplessly right along with him

 

* * *

 

As it turns out they’ve not travelled far. North, certainly, and just far enough that the King’s guards of their own Kingdom patrol the roads in reluctant fellowship with the leather-clad, be-plumed Black Knights of Queen Regina’s realm. Meaning that they stick mostly to the woods and the riverbanks, her role in their banishment from the Jolly still unconfirmed. Still, Hook has no problem guiding them back to the ocean’s edge, the journey to the nearest port town taking only a couple of hours even without a mysterious magical benefactor (or otherwise) to spirit them on their way.

It’s a market day, the docks heaving with people hawking their goods and spending a month’s keep, so it’s easy enough to flit amongst them and eye up the craft resting at their moorings. Hook hums quietly to himself, his eyes shrewd as they fall on each ship in turn not unlike one of the salesmen around him when they spot an easy pitch.

Emma, on the other hand, is not yet convinced.

“So we're just gonna… Take a ship. Like, walk up, climb aboard, and sail away.”

“That's the long and the short of it, yes.”

Emma wrinkles her nose, wrapping the edges of her new cloak tighter around her body.

“And if we're caught?”

“We hang, most likely,” Hook looks down at her with a sort of befuddled amusement. “Forgive me, Swan, but why such concern? This is hardly your first foray into criminal life.”

Emma huffs out a heavy breath in reply, and begins surreptitiously counting the number of King’s guards and knights mulling about. It’s one thing cutting a coin purse free and disappearing into a crowd, but she’s reasonably sure a man o’ war isn’t going to fit into the capricious folds of her cloak.

“That's different. I was mainly robbing _you_.”

“I'm not entirely sure how to take that,” he admits, tugging her into the shadows, his hand hovering over the pommel of his sword as a guard passes a little too close for comfort.

“It wasn't meant as a compliment,” she grumbles, and tilts her head towards the water’s edge. “Now, do you see anything you fancy?”

Hook mumbles something about loaded questions before stepping back out onto the crowded docks, his hood up and his hook tucked into his cloak. She watches the way his eyes narrow as he catches sight of a battered looking sloop resting at the furthest mooring.

“That one?” she hisses. “Really? It looks like a right piece of junk.”

“Have you never heard the saying beggars can't be choosers, Swan? She's fully rigged and seaworthy enough for my liking.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

She can just make out the flash of his teeth under the shadow of the hood. “Jealous?”

“In your dreams, buddy.”

“Oh most vividly, I assure you. Would you like me to share some of them with you?”

“Can we just get to the robbery and hanging part of the day? Please?”

“Suit yourself.” Hook fishes a coin from the depths of one of his myriad pockets, and exchanges it for an apple from a passing vendor. He tosses it to her with a wink. “Keep your strength up lass. Piracy is a long game.”

They spend the day hanging around the dockland market pretending to consider the qualities of spices and bolts of cloth whilst keeping careful watch on the habits of the patrolling Black Knights, or at least they do until the noonday sun begins to beat down and turns their heavy cloaks and hoods into swelteringly poor disguises. Hook is forced to retreat to the back alleys, his stare a heavy weight on her back as she chats up salespeople for any information she can find, and turns her face to the sun.

His aren’t the only eyes drawn to her, and she takes advantage as best she can, tossing her golden hair over her shoulder so that it catches the light, forcing her shoulders a little further back than usual to show off her breasts to their best advantage as she passes a crowd of Black Knights. It works, a wolf whistle coming from one of the men as they step out of line and move to circle her.

“What are you selling, missy?” one of them calls as his cat-calling colleague stops to make a point of checking out her backside.

She twists her mouth into a coy smile and looks up at him through her lashes.

“Depends.” She says, her voice wavering on the line between girlish and sultry, “What are you looking to buy?”

Another man steps forward to tug at the end of her hair, and she presses her hand against her skirts just to reassure herself that her knife is still strapped tightly to her thigh.

“You’re a rare beast, aren’t you?” says the hair grabber, his breath a little too hot against the shell of her ear,

“I’m not a horse!” she snaps before she can stop herself, cringing inwardly as the men straighten to attention around her. She bites her lip, bats her lashes, and imagines what their necks snapping would sound like. “That is, I can be whatever you want. For a price.”

She can actually see the glint in the hair grabbers eyes and is ready to go for the kill when there’s a sudden commotion outside of their little circle, and Hook comes barrelling in amongst them in a whirl of flailing limbs, his cloak replaced with a tattered fisherman’s coat and his left wrist ending in a stiff, gloved hand.,

“Jenny!” he cries, reaching out for her with glazed eyes. “Jenny, there you are!”

Emma’s mouth opens and closes wordlessly as Hook staggers against one of the knights, who grabs him by the shoulder and holds him out at arm’s length.

“Jenny, eh?” the first knight asks, looking between them in amusement. “And who’s this then?”

Hook sways slightly on the spot, squinting at her. She narrowly avoids rolling her eyes.

“I’ve been looking for you!” he coos, and the knights snigger.

“This drunken slob your paramour?” titters the hair grabber. “No wonder you fancy a go at a real man!”

Emma bites down on the urge to scream in irritation, and forces herself to simper up at him.

“He’s not my paramour,” she says, slightly louder than she needs to, “and he’s not drunk either. He’s just,” she catches Hook’s eye and flashes him a dark look, “a little simple-minded.”

This seems to tickle them even further, and the man holding Hook shoves him towards her with such force that he half bounces off her chest, forcing her bodily backwards into another of the knights.

“Go on then!” The man she’s landed against calls, pushing her back towards Hook, “Give the poor lad a kiss!”

Hook shifts closer, his expression still vague and his eyes far away. She hates that she knows him well enough to notice the almost imperceptible lift of his eyebrow. With a small grumble that she hopes isn’t terribly audible, she pushes up on her tip-toes to drop a small, closed-mouthed kiss just at the corner of his lips. The knights hoot and holler around them, and she pulls back before she can pay too much attention to the way his scuff feels against her skin.

“Looks like it’s your lucky day, mate.” Hair-grabber grins, throwing a bag of coin that Emma catches in mid-air before Hook can move and give away the stiffness of his fake hand. “Let us know how she is, yeah?”

They move away down the docks, leaving Hook and Emma standing too close at the water’s edge, the bag of coin held between them like some terrible half-promise.

“Jenny?” Emma hisses. “What the hell was that about? I had it in hand, Hook!”

“Did you?” he asks, all pretense gone and his eyes suddenly rapier sharp. “Didn’t look like it to me.”

“It’s not supposed to look like a setup, Hook. It’s supposed to look like - ”

“Like you’re soliciting the attentions of dangerous men, aye. I guessed as much. You do tend to make a habit of it.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she hisses.

“Oh really? So you don’t stun men out of their sanity and rob them for fun? That’s not the plan?”

He holds out his hand, and she lets the coin purse drop into his palm without really thinking about it. He tosses it up and down a couple of time as if testing the weight of it.

“Looks like you were successful in it, though, regardless.”

Emma lets out a long breath, and folds her arms over her chest. It’s not that he’s wrong as such - hadn’t she fluttered and flirted her way out of starvation more often than she cares to remember? - but she hates the implication that that’s what she did to him.

But then, perhaps it was. She’s not sure she knows anymore. Not sure she wants to.

“I was trying to find out when they’ll be leaving, so that you wouldn’t have to skulk about in the shadows all day.”

Hook looks at her for a beat, then sighs, his shoulders dropping. “And now a simple-minded fool has exposed himself to one and all. Would an apology help?”

“Would I get one if it would?” she asks, and he shrugs with a small, soft smile that makes her chest ache.

“Good enough, I guess,” she says, smiling slightly, and folds his fingers over the coin purse, holding on a little longer than necessary. “Still, we got paid.  And I didn’t even have to knock anyone out for getting handsy.”

Hook looks down to where her hand still covers his, and smiles.

“We do make quite the team, Swan.”

“Yeah,” she swallows hard, “I suppose we do.”

* * *

 

The traders pack up as dusk falls, hawkers and shoppers alike making for the warmth of the hearthside as the wind changes and the cold starts to bite. Hook and Emma move too, making their way to a rickety gantry that runs along the harbour wall and abuts the hulls of the bobbing ships. They decide to wait for full dark before attempting to take the sloop, when the night watchman’s eyes will hopefully be dropping enough for them to sneak by unnoticed,

Full dark brings more than thin moonlight and a guard’s snores, though. Full dark brings the drunks, the vagabonds, the seedy underbelly of society crawling out of hidden doorways and staggering from taverns.

“You know,” Hook whispers against her ear as they swing quietly on the rope ladders against the harbour wall, “I’d never realised quite how irritating a street full of drunks could be, before now.”

“Yeah, because you’re usually one of th - what are you doing?”

He smiles at her from around the cork of his flask, hanging from the ladder by his hook as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“Joining them?”

“Ugh!” Emma tugs the flask from his hand, taking a long swig herself before letting it drop into the murky water below.

“Really?” he says, pouting after the drink as it sinks into the mire.

“Really. Now are we doing this or not?”

He rolls his eyes, and gracefully launches himself up the ladder, crouching in the shadow of the sloop as Emma drags herself up to join him.

“Stick with me,” he whispers, and she nods furiously, a thrill running down her spine as he strides out for the gangplank, a little stumble in his step as a crowd of revellers jostle their way to the next tavern. She’s only three steps behind - his feet are already halfway to boarding - when a gust of wind catches her hood, blowing it back and down, and then, before she can tug it back into place:

“Oi! Oi, Jenny!”

Hook freezes, almost impossible to see in the shadows, not like her with her too bright hair, caught like last night’s supper as the whistles and cat calls start up.

“Where’ve you been? We’ve been looking for you!”

She cringes a silent apology to Hook’s back, then turns to the Black Knights with a wide smile and one hand on her dagger.

“Hey boys,” she puts a little swagger in her step as she walks away from the sloop, hoping they’ll follow the swing of her hips and not whatever Hook is doing on deck. “Drinking on duty?”

There’s a chorus of sniggers as they make to gather round her again, but there’s something darker, more frightening about it in the dark of night with whisky on their breath and without the surety of Hook’s eyes on her back.

“Who wouldn’t want to mix a little business and pleasure,” sneers hair grabber, chucking his thumb under her chin and smiling his gap toothed smile a little too close to her own tightly pressed lips. “What happened to loverboy, hmmm?”

“Maybe she wore him out,” calls another man, “she looks the sort.”

“Oh yes,” hair grabber licks his lips, and Emma squeezes the dagger tighter. “I bet there’s a good few fu - “

She rips her dagger free, thrusting the point up under hair grabber’s chin. But before she can move, before anyone can move, there’s a terrible scream from somewhere overhead accompanied by the sound of tearing cloth. They look up just in time to see a dark shadow fly above them, scattering the men and sending Emma’s dagger skittering away across the cobbles. Hook lands in a flamboyant swirl of discarded cloak and coiled rope looking like the personification of murder - if murder wore leather breeches and a maniacal grin.

“Now boys,” he says, hook and cutlass at the ready and seemingly delighted to be outnumbered ten to one, “is that any way to talk to a lady?”

“ _Hook_ ,” somebody growls.

“Ah,” he says with a wink to Emma and the smallest of bows, “so you’ve heard of me.”

The clash of steel is immediate. Incessant. Emma attempts to crawl her way to her dagger, but she’s stopped by dancing, parrying feet as Hook merrily engages every man who comes at him. He’s doing well, too. There’s a scratch on his cheek and a tear in the sleeve of his coat, but men drop around him like nine pins. One, two, three, another, until there are only four men left standing and Hook in the middle of them, a steel wielding dervish.

And then, stillness. Hook’s sword clattering to rest beside her dagger.

One man has his sword at Hook’s chest, his brothers-in-arms watching with heaving chests as he slowly runs it up to his throat.

“You’ve caused a bit of trouble for our Queen, Captain. Time to pay up.”

Emma watches the bob of his adam’s apple against the sword’s tip. “Delighted to hear it. Unfortunately, you’ll find me penniless. A far better thief than you got to me first.”

He catches her eye, and she waits for a sign. For a plan. What she gets is the smallest of smiles and a single half mouthed word.

_Run._

She mouths one back.

_No._

“Suit yourself,” drawls his captor, and draws back to strike the killing blow.

Emma staggers to her feet, her ears buzzing, vision swimming, her brain empty of anything but one desperate liturgy. No. No. No.

Flame - burning, terrible flame - bursts from her fingertips. The man who had Hook at sword point flies in a graceless arc across the dock, landing in a crumpled, twitching heap against a stable door. Hair grabber stops, turns, lifts his sword to her throat, blood dripping from his chin and spittle flying into her face as he splutters his disbelief.

“Don’t just stand there!” someone screams. “Kill the bitch!”

There’s a beat where she stands stock still, staring at the palms of her hands and the sparks chasing between her fingers, and then he’s on her, dragging her away with the curve of his hook pressed against her belly. His breath comes in grunts and gasps as he arcs his recovered sword and sends another knight crumpling to the ground.

Panic claws up her throat - not because of their attackers or the whistle of his steel so close to her face - but at the way her skin is burning, still burning, and her blood is thrumming hot through her veins.

What’s happening to me? she wants to ask, wants to scream, but her voice doesn’t seem to want to work and what comes out instead is barely a whimper. She thinks he must hear her though, because he pulls her impossibly tighter before letting go. He throws himself into the gap between the dock and the ocean, landing with a grunt on the rotten little gantry they’d clambered along just hours ago. There’s a skiff moored there, oars at the ready, and he cuts it free before turning to look up at her with outstretched arms.

“Jump.” he says, voice strained but expression unreadable.

Emma stares at the way the sea spray plays with the light on her skin, little rainbows coalescing on the web of her thumb.

“Emma!” he barks, and the use of her real name is enough to snap her to attention. “Just jump, I’ll catch you.”

It’s probably twelve feet. She probably won’t drown. Probably.

She thinks of the way he’d spoken about magic back in the light of the campfire, of the way the shadows had played around the twist of his mouth as he’d spoken of fear and death and hate.

_Dark magic._

_There's no other sort._

He probably won’t catch her. Why would he.

She can hear the commotion in the streets behind her, the shouts of drunks and the moans of wounded men will draw backup soon if they haven’t already. She looks down into the dirty grey of the water.

“I have magic.” she breathes, and it almost sounds like an apology to her own ears.

A shadow flickers across Hook’s face, but as soon as it appears it’s replaced by an extravagant eye roll and an encouraging gesture with his raised arms.

“I promise,” he says, and it sounds so sincere that, as she jumps, she almost believes him.

* * *

 

Of course he catches her. Of course he does. She just hasn’t the faintest clue why, just as she’s still not figured out why she’s still here, bundled in a skiff more pitch than wood and heading to who knows where. 

“Why did you save me?”

The skiff slows the further from the lights of the port they travel, Hook’s eyes unreadable in the darkness and his silence absolute.

”I’m nothing to you, you don’t need me. I wouldn't have saved me.”

She picks at the skin around her nails as she speaks, as if trying the peel away the evidence of what she'd done.

“I don't know what else I could have done,” he says brusquely from between the oars. “You saved me first.”

She curls her hands into her lap and bows her head. The drag and splash of the oars stop, and he lets out a heavy sigh.

“Emma,” he says lowly, “did you know?”

She looks back at him, surprised by the question and even more so by the calm, gentle way he's looking at her.

“Of course I didn't,” she half sobs, half snarls, “do you think I'd have let you fight them alone if I had? Do you think this would have been my _life_ if I had?”

Something - _magic_ \- fizzes in her palms and she clenches her fists so tightly she almost draws blood, but Hook doesn't balk at her tone, just studies her with those too blue eyes.

“Perhaps neither of us are as trusting as we ought to be, Swan.”

She scoffs, but her heart feels a little lighter and she lets her fingers relax just slightly in her lap.

“A pirate and a thief, not trusting one another, now there's a story for the ages.”

“Oh I don't know,” he says lightly as he picks the oars back up, “it might be.”

They drag the skiff aground in a sandy cove far from the lights of any nearby towns. It's a beautiful clear night, but the wind is colder than it’s been for weeks and along with the salt water drenching her petticoats it soon sets her to shivering. Hook starts gathering driftwood for their second unexpected forest sleepover, but not before removing his long leather duster and dropping it at her feet.

“Make use of it,” he says a trifle gruffly, “it won't grow any warmer.”

She tucks it over her shoulders as she watches him search the darkness along the tide line for kindling. It seems surreal to be sitting here in his coat, surrounded by the smell of sweat and salt and sage, owing him her life, when only days ago she'd been watching him swing in her net.

When he kneels before her to build the fire she watches the pull of his waistcoat over his shoulders, and the way his pirates luck glints as the moonlight catches it.

“Does it work,” she asks, mainly to distract herself from the sudden urge to run her fingers through his hair. “The lucky necklace? Does it work?”

He stops arranging the firewood and raises an eyebrow.

“Odd question, that,” he says, “what brings it on?”

Emma shrugs and burrows herself deeper into the warmth of his coat, “Just doesn't seem to be very lucky, since you've ended up here on the run for your life.”

Hook quirks his lips into a lopsided smile. “Well for a pirate, love, that's an everyday occurrence.”

“But your ship,” she says, the words bitter on her tongue, “and your crew!”

He shakes his head, returning to his fire building with a little more aggression.

“Long gone by now, what’s left of them, no doubt. But they'll get theirs, Swan. Fear not. We may be pirates but there's a code we live by, and those that have betrayed me will pay dearly for it.”

“You must wish you'd never met me,” she mumbles, pulling the high collar around her face, “I've brought nothing but trouble.”

Hook stops, dropping the last of the firewood into the sand, and reaches over the banked wood to lift her chin with his thumb.

“Swan,” he says, “you robbed me blind, caught me in a trap, got me almost killed by knights and made me row a bloody skiff for miles with one hand and a hook.” He smiles, and even in the moonlight his eyes seem to shine brighter than the sun. “Meeting you has been a bloody adventure, and I wouldn't change it for all the ships and gold in the world.”

She gives him a watery smile, “Really?”

“Well,” he shrugs, “maybe for _all_ the ships and gold in the world. I'm still a pirate.”

Emma sniffs out a little laugh. “Good,” she says softly, and he lets his hand linger on her face a moment longer.

“My my, isn’t this romantic!”

They spring apart, eyes darting around the cove for the owner of the disembodied voice. Emma goes for her dagger before she realises she’s left it far behind on the dockside cobbles, so throws her hands out in front of her instead. Beside her, Hook draws his sword wearily.

“Again? I’m getting a little old for this, lads.”

“You, Captain?” there’s a light chuckle that seems to echo around the dunes. “And to think, I’ve heard such stories.”

“Seems poor form,” Hook calls, “to taunt a man without showing your face.”

“Oh, where are my manners?”

A man, at least Emma thinks it’s a man, rises from the greenish bracken at the dune’s edge, his cloak a perfect camouflage and his hood pulled low over his face, his only notable feature the oddly curved silver dagger that hangs at his waist.

Hook seems to sway on the spot, his sword trembling as he gestures toward it.

“You - Where did you get that! Return it at once or I’ll use it to cleave the flesh from your bones!”

He leaps forward with a snarl, his sword pointed straight at the figure’s heart, when, as if from nowhere a half dozen - no, more - people rise from the safety of the dunes, all armed with bows, their arrows notched and pointed directly at Hook.

The figure lowers his hood to reveal a handsome young man not much older than Emma herself, with a head of dark curls and two dimples that flash when he smiles.

“Tell me, how do you feel about deals?”


	4. Outlaws

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired in part by a Kevin Costner movie. Which one should soon become obvious!

Hook dives forward, his hand and hook both clawing for the other man’s throat, before he’s brought crashing to the ground by a large, grey-haired man who kneels heavily on Hook’s lower back and presses his face into the sand.

Emma jolts as a spark flickers across her fingertips. She can feel the buzzing in her head again, can feel the way it travels down her spine, her arms, something like being set alight only without the pain and with twice the fear.

“Let him go!”

Hook struggles under the larger man’s weight, and lets out a string of muffled grunts that she assumes are either agreement or aspersions about the man’s mother.

“He can’t breathe,” Emma hisses at the curly haired man, who is watching Hook’s struggles with a sort of insouciant smile.

“Loud, though, isn’t he. For a man who’s suffocating.”

There’s a burn in her palm so intense she curls her fingers in until she’s sure she’s drawn blood, every word bitten out as she glares at their captor.

“Let. Him. _Go_.”

The man looks at her, his eyes slightly narrowed as if he’s seen her somewhere before but can’t quite place her.

“Alright, Little John,” he says levelly. “Let him up.”

Little John - the aging giant, presumably - gets to his feet with an exaggerated huff, and drags Hook with him by the collar of his shirt. Hook struggles free of his grasp just far enough to spit a mouthful of sand at the other man’s feet, before being dragged bodily back, both arms held behind his back by Little John’s enormous hands.

“Now, Captain. I didn’t expect this sort of behaviour from you. I thought you were a man of ideals.”

“Depends on the ideals,” Hook spits.

“Loyalty?” The man asks. “Love? Vengeance? Your reputation precedes you.”

“Really?” Hook draws himself up to his full height, but it’s not exactly imposing next to not-so Little John. “And what does my reputation say I’m likely to do to insolent lads who think they can rob me, hmmmm? You want a deal? I’ll give you a deal. I’ll take my hook to that smile until even your mother couldn’t love you, and you’ll thank me for being _merciful_.”

The man laughs, light and genuine, and pulls the dagger free of his belt. He tosses it in the air - once, twice - and smiles at the way Hook’s eyes follow its flight.

“I think you’ll like my deal a lot more, Captain.” He tucks the dagger away and holds out his hand. Hook stares at it in disgust until John forces his arm out for the other man to shake. “My name’s Roland. Roland Hood. And if you and your lovely companion would care to come with us…” he gestures to the silent, watchful masses gathered on the dunes. “We have much to discuss.”

Little John ties Hook’s wrists firmly behind his back, shoving him ahead of him through the dunes and on into the forest. The others follow them, Roland Hood offers Emma his arm but she ignores it, pointedly scrambling her way over shifting sands until they’re replaced with the soft moss of the forest floor.

“What’s your name?” Roland asks with a little more friendliness than Emma cares for.

She refuses to look at him, keeping her eyes fixed on Hook’s stiff back instead.

“Mysterious, are you? I like that.”

It doesn’t suit him, the semi-leer she can hear in his voice. He sounds a bit like a child trying to flirt for the first time. She takes just enough pity on him to keep the majority of the ice out of her tone, but keeps her eyes fixed on Hook.

“Emma. And I’m not interested.”

“No,” he huffs, small and amused. “No, I don’t suppose you are. Still, welcome to our home.”

They stop as a group, and Emma looks around blankly. At first glance there’s nothing to suggest any sort of camp - no firepits or shelters - only the closely pressed trees and winding vines of ivy.

“It’s not much, is it.”

Roland smiles, and taps her gently on the shoulder.

“No? Look up.”

She can't help it. She gasps.

It’s not like any forest Emma has ever seen, and she’s certainly seen more than her fair share of them.

It's ridiculous.

What she’d first thought was ivy twisted around the trunks is really a fine network of ladders and ropes that lead up into the wide canopy, where, dozens of feet above their heads, a whole society seems to be going about their morning business. Emma watches, mouth agape, as a woman leads a gaggle of children from one treetop platform to another over a swaying bridge. Somewhere on a higher platform she can hear a man singing in a deep rich baritone, and the laughter and applause of his audience.

She wanders a little way from the group, Roland following, just to keep the children in her sights as they begin to disappear between the branches

"This is - " she splutters, and Roland grins.

"Something else, isn't it?" he says, gesturing widely. "Life was difficult for us after the Evil Queen came to power. We were left without homes, without hope. My parents started this place. At first it was just a camp for outlaws, more criminals than family, but over time..." he pauses, smiling so that his dimples flash in the dappled light. "I was born in these woods, you know. It's the only life I've ever known. I'm not sure I would even change it now, even if I could."

Emma nods dumbly, and wonders what that must feel like.

She was born in the woods too, or at least that's what she has always presumed. A foundling, dumped at the too small doorway of the benevolent queen of the fairies. She's never lived in a house with a roof, not for more than a night or two at a time anyway after a particularly good score gave her the excuse for a warm bed and a tepid hip bath. She's never sat and laughed at an old man's stories, or giggled with a friend as she skipped off to school.

Blue may have been benevolent, but she was never the giggling sort.

"Now," Roland turns to her with a smile, "surely you must be exhausted. Why don't you get yourself settled while we discuss terms with your companion?"

Emma blinks. She'd been so caught up in the beauty above her that she'd almost forgotten that Hook is still bound and seething back with Little John.

"I'd rather be with him," she says, attempting to mirror Roland's polite smile.

Roland hums, then beckons somebody down from one of the trees.

"How about a bath?" he says, as a woman drops neatly to the ground nearby. "Grace here can show you the way to the springs."

Temptation makes her bite her lip. Her stolen chemise may have been within the realms of clean when Hook gave it to her, but the salt water has stiffened her skirt and petticoats and her legs are aching and sore.

"No harm will befall your friend, I assure you," Roland says. "John's bark is a lot worse than his bite."

"He's not my friend," she says without really thinking about it. Grace offers her a sweet, slightly knowing, smile and her hand.

"Oh," something a little like disappointment flits across Roland's face, but it's gone before she can really be certain. "Well, regardless. He's quite safe with us."

She almost makes a snide comment about it not being Hook that she's worried about, but Roland has been a gentleman of sorts and she doesn't want to cause ructions - Hook is quite capable of doing that on his own. Anyway, she isn't sure that it wouldn't be a lie. Instead she flashes Hook what she hopes is a faintly reassuring smile and shrugs off his coat, leaving it draped over a low branch.

There's something sort of bizarre about following a complete stranger through the woods to the gods know where, but then that's been Emma's life in a nutshell lately.

Grace is quiet and oddly familiar, saying little except occasional encouragements that it's not too far now, and to be careful to watch her step as they pick their way over bulging tree roots and around mossy puddles.

"It's okay, you know," Emma says on the third occasion that Grace reaches to help her over a fallen log, "I've lived in the woods all of my life. I won't break."

Grace flushes slightly, looking down. "I'm sorry," she says, "I didn't know."

"Hey, it's okay." Emma smiles. "Ignore me. I'm being rude - I'm just not used to people looking after me."

Grace looks over her shoulder at her in surprise. "Really? But I thought that Captain..."

Emma fights the urge to roll her eyes. Apparently gossip doesn't spread any more slowly among the treetops than it does through a tavern at closing time.

"He's just a friend."

"You told Roland he wasn't a friend." Grace lifts one querulous eyebrow before turning back to the path ahead.

"It's complicated."

"Well," Grace says, "the best things usually are."

"I wouldn't know about that, I don’t tend to see many of those." Emma mumbles, and then pushes the rising bitterness down hard into her belly. "Tell me about yourself, Grace."

"Oh not much to tell really," she says as she swings her way over a puddle using a convenient vine. "I lost my parents when I was a child. Roland's father took me in, and after he... left. I stayed. Didn't have anywhere else to go."

"Yeah," says Emma. "I know that feeling."

"The Evil Queen has much to answer for," Grace says. They seem to have come to a dead end, a curtain of bracken and leaves blocking their way. Grace seems unconcerned however, and after a moment of fumbling begins tugging at what was a carefully concealed vine rope. "But it hasn't been a bad life, all in all."

The curtain of greenery lifts away to reveal an oasis. There's a pool of glittering, clear water, bubbles rising gently from one end where a spring must be feeding into it, the banks sandy and shaded by trees.

Once, as a small child, she had lifted a book from some distracted nobleman's daughter on one of the rare occasions Blue had let her out of her sight. The words had been beyond her - the fairies were never much cut out for teaching - but it had been full of stunning pictures of princesses and terrifying beasts, boys with swords and beautiful mermaids who brushed their hair at the water’s edge.

There might even have been a pirate or two, now she thinks on it.

But it's the mermaids she thinks of now. Beautiful, otherworldly creatures with hair like the sunset or spun gold who could bewitch men with a single song.

It would be a childhood dream come true. If she had soap.

"Here." Grace drops a small, paper-wrapped cube into her hand. "It's not much, but I'll wager it's more than you're used to."

The little bar smells of lavender, and Emma is horrified to realise there are tears in her eyes.

"Thank you," she says, rather more croakily than she'd like. "Thank you so much."

"Oh, it's not a bother," says Grace gently. "I'll return in a little while. Take your time."

She does.

In the first instance she can't help but walk straight in - clothes and all - and marvel at how warm the water is here even as the year draws on. She pats at her skirts as they rise in the water around her, giggling a little to herself as she spins and watches the way they follow after her. There are practicalities, though, that must be seen to.

She sheds her clothes, scrubbing at the worst of the stains with the corner of the lavender soap and then spreading them on the sandy banks to dry as best they can. They're mainly beyond hope, though, only her stolen chemise worth the title, so she saves most of the soap for herself.

And gods, does she luxuriate in it.

She scrubs her hair, her body, rubs at her face until she's certain the skin is almost red raw, covers every inch of herself in soap suds until Grace's little bar is nothing but a thin layer of bubbles on the water’s surface and clinging to the edges of her hair. Then, for lack of anything else to clean or anything to clean it with if there were, she floats on her back and lets the gentle current of the pool soothe her joints and soul.

She wonders if her parents knew about this place. Perhaps they were outlaws themselves, running from evil or justice or both and unable to raise the baby they brought into the world. Maybe there was only a mother, old and tired and with nothing to give another mouth to feed, or young, too young, lost and afraid and just as alone as Emma has always been.

If they'd brought her here instead to to Blue, she wonders if she'd have spent so much of her life hating them so bitterly. It certainly feels harder to hate with the water lapping at her belly and lavender in the air.

She wonders if Hook would like it here, if he too would hate less if he were stripped of his leathers and swallowed by the warmth of the water, but those are dangerous thoughts, so she turns over and dives down until she can touch the smooth stone of the pool's floor and her heart throbs from holding her breath rather than thinking of his skin slicked wet and how it might feel under hers.

She bursts from the water with a gasp, shoving her wet hair out of her face to see Grace hovering on the bank.

"Roland sent me, their business is concluded. The Captain is asking for you."

She doesn't call him her friend, at least. That’s something.

Her heavy skirt, corset and petticoats are still wet, but her chemise is dry enough to pull on. She throws the others over her arm as Grace begins fiddling with the foliage curtain again.

“Are we in a hurry?” she asks, half stumbling over untied laces as Grace marches back towards the treetop town.

“The Captain was very insistent,” Grace says shortly. “He doesn’t seem to trust us with you very much.”

“Not really his strong suit, trust. Nor mine, for that matter.”

Grace pauses, and turns to Emma with a suddenly shrewd expression. That flash of familiarity Emma had felt earlier returns ten-fold, and suddenly she can picture Grace, laughing and sly, accepting a chain of gold from Smee, can imagine the ease with which she could have picked a pocket, lifted a chest, taken a dagger.

“And yet here you are.”

Emma has a sudden image of herself, naked and unarmed, as vulnerable as she’s been since her earliest childhood, the water of the pool turning red as she sinks helplessly into the depths, betrayed and murdered by a stranger who won her trust with something as small as a piece of soap.

“Yeah,” she stands a little taller, voice a little more steely. “I suppose I am.”

They don’t speak much after that, making it back to the square where they’d left Roland in double quick time. He’s waiting for them as if they’d never left, all smiles and open arms, Hook standing beside him, his hook returned and his hair is still sticking up at bizarre angles. His expression is fixed in a dark, serious scowl.

"So," Emma says, as brightly as she can manage with her skirts and corset hanging over her arms, "how did your manly meeting go? Did you eat a bunch of overcooked meat and bang your chests a lot?"

Hook says nothing, his eyes fixed somewhere in the vague area of her left foot. Roland, on the other hand, is simply beaming.

"I think you'll find we've come to an accord, isn't that so, Captain?"

Hook grunts.

"Right." Emma squeezes her clothing a little closer to her and shuffles uncomfortably from one foot to the other. "So, are we going then?"

She's asking Hook - he must know she's asking him - but again it's Roland who speaks.

"We thought it might be an idea for you to stay here, just for tonight or perhaps for another couple of days. You might need to regain your strength before you move on, and you’re most welcome. Really, most welcome."

Hook's lips press harder together until they're nothing but a thin white crease between the ticking muscles of his jaw. Emma feels her brows lift until they’re somewhere in the region of her hairline.

It’s a little much, the effusive way in which Roland speaks, the way his eyes seem to be asking questions of her she can’t quite understand. Nobody’s ever made such a big deal of wanting her around, not ever, and she barely knows how to react. In fact she’s about to make some half-baked polite refusal when Hook lifts his eyes to hers.

It’s only for a second, a quick flash of blue before he looks away again, but she can read him more easily than any book. Yes, he’s angry, irate even. But there’s something else there too Something that makes her heart beat a little bit faster and her breath catch in her throat.

He’s scared.

"And what are we moving on to, exactly?"

There must be something in her tone, because Roland's smile drops away like the sun passing behind a cloud.

"Perhaps you had best discuss it between yourselves. I can have Grace show you to a room, if you like?"

The wind catches at the damp hem of her chemise and makes her shiver, but she keeps her stare locked on Hook. She should never have left him. He's a pirate, and he's wily enough, but angry men rarely make good negotiators. Frightened men, even less so. She’s not sure she even wants to discuss whatever has frightened Captain Hook. Whatever it is, it’s hardly likely to be conducive to a pleasant night’s rest.

She doesn't say that, though. Just bites at the inside of her cheek and bestows Roland with her most grateful smile.

"Yes, thank you. I'd like that."

Hook just stands there as Grace leads her off again, his eyes on the dirt. It's only as she's mounting a ladder that she spots the tell-tale glint of silver at his hip.

Emma doesn’t know a lot about victory - hasn’t experienced it much truth be told -but she doesn’t think he looks much like a man who’s won. 

* * *

 

Grace leads her to a little treehouse away from the bustling centre of their town. It’s rustic - she’ll be picking splinters out of her hands for weeks probably - but it’s warm and dry, with a handmade chair and a straw bed covered with a thick wool blanket, so she doesn’t have to fake her gratitude when Grace shows her the balcony she can hang her damp clothes from, or the metal grate where she can light a peat fire.

It almost feels like a home.

Grace leaves her, and Emma finds herself pottering around the small space, sniffing distastefully at the slightly goaty cheese on the ramshackle table and fiddling with the kettle over the fire. Her thoughts constantly wander to what it might have been like to live in a place like this. To live a life like this, with warmth and food and someone to come back to.

A home.

“Don’t get comfortable.”

Hook lets the door slam behind him and it bounces off its hinges, once, twice, three times until the latch finally clicks into place. He still looks like thunder, and Emma eyes him cautiously, keeping the table between them until she can get a better read on what’s going on.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” she says. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

He lifts his chin and tilts his head to one side - but the smile he gives her is the one she’s seen him throw at half a dozen whores, the wide one with too many teeth and not enough lines around the eyes. It doesn’t fool her one bit.

“What makes you think something’s going on?”

She leans forward against the table and nods down to the curved steel peeking out from under his coat.

“You’re wearing the dagger and Roland’s still alive. Something is clearly going on.”

He looks down at himself briefly, seemingly almost bemused at finding the dagger there, then casts a rather desperate gaze around the room until it alights on the bed.

“This bed is looking awfully lonely. If you’ll excuse me I intend to rectify that at once.” He grins that terrible grin again, and sidles past her, casting off first his coat and then his sword belt before collapsing face down on the soft straw with groan of such pure ecstasy that Emma almost regrets the sneer behind her next words.

“Oh, you get the bed do you? It’s like that now.”

He rolls onto his back and folds his arms behind his head, looking at her with such wide-eyed innocence she’s not sure if she wants to jump him or brain him.

“You hate me being gentlemanly, so I assumed you’d want to take the chair.”

“You’re a bastard,” she snorts, and he gestures to his too-innocent face as if to say what, me?

“Not guilty. My parents were legally wed, more’s the tragedy.”

He wriggles his hips, pretending to get comfortable while simultaneously watching her like a hawk. Well, if he thinks he can distract her that easily… he winks - a pathetic, sleepy sort of thing - and she sighs in defeat. He’s probably right.

“Oh, shove over.”

He looks a little gobsmacked, and she can’t really blame him. She’s a little shocked herself. Yes, she’s lain with him in far fewer clothes than her chemise, and yes, he’s the one who started it by claiming the bed for himself, but it’s still different, squeezing herself into the space at his side sober. It’s different, they’re different. He’s different.

He’s hiding something, but then she’s starting to think maybe she is too.

“Swan…”

She grins at how horrified he sounds, pressing herself up against his side just because she can.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she drawls, “I’m tired.”

“Emma,” he warns in a low voice.

“I said _don’t_ ,” she says, but there’s no venom in it.

Very little truth either, in all honesty.

“No - I,” he swallows hard, so hard she can feel it vibrate down the length of her arm where it’s pressed against his. “I made a deal.”

“You don’t say.”

She smiles up at him, a bright, open smile that she hopes he’ll return with some openness of his own, but instead she watches as his face seems to crumple, his eyes squeezed shut as if he’s in physical pain.

“Emma, you have to go home.”

She blinks at him, gobsmacked into silence for a moment, before hot rage simmers its way through her veins.

“ _Excuse_ me?”

“You heard me. I shouldn’t have let you follow me in the first place, but you’re so bloody stubborn and I - well. It doesn’t matter, not anymore. Roland has agreed to help you make your way home. Whatever provisions you require - maps - ”

She shakes her head in disbelief, but now he’s started it’s almost like he can’t stop. As though he has to spit the words out before they swallow him whole.

“I have a few things you can take to ease your passage, I won’t require them so they may as well go to you, the Jolly is probably long gone, but if you find her I’m sure you wouldn’t be adverse to a bit of plundering - “

“ _Hook_ ,” she tries, but he rambles on.

“Unless you’d rather stay? I can see the appeal, and no doubt Mr Hood would be delighted - “

“Killian!”

She's never used his first name before, not ever, and judging by the look of shock on his face he's probably forgotten he ever told her it. She presses her hand against his chest, half to ground him and half to reassure herself of the beating of his heart.

“Why are you talking as though you’re writing a will?”

He shrugs, his hand coming up as if to cover hers before he apparently thinks better of it and let's it drop to the blanket, his fingers twitching restlessly.

“Well. I suppose I am. Had to happen eventually, even to me.”

She tucks that weird bit of phrasing away for later consideration, and hoists herself up onto her elbow so that she can look him in the eye.

“Tell me. What the hell have you done?”

Hook closes his eyes and let's out a long sigh. He looks older, suddenly. His face tight and lined like a man who's seen too much horror and not enough softness.

She knows that look, knows how it feels, and she wants to kiss him. Wants to make him smile the smile that wipes it all away. She wants a lot of things, here in this secret space where there's no one but them, but then he’s speaking. So she pretends she doesn't.

“The Hood boy, he told me all about his parents. How they lived peacefully outside of the laws with others who had no place to go - no where to call home. He made it sound idyllic.”

“Yeah, he told me, too.”

“It wasn’t though, not always. His mother was killed by the Evil Queen when he was barely more than an infant, and that’s when his father began to build a world of their own, a place they could defend, where they could feel safe. She attacked when Roland was nine, razed the trees to the ground and disappeared into the night, taking his father with her.”

“That must have been awful,” she says, and means it. To have never had something, someone, is miserable enough. But to have it and lose them? Her fingers tighten around the material of Hook’s shirt.

“According to Roland, she ripped his father’s heart right out of his chest, and the man just followed after her - meek as a lamb.”

Emma balks, her face scrunched up in disgust.

“She can do that?”

“I’ve seen it done,” Hook says, and there's an undercurrent to it, something dark and angry that colours his next words. “It does things to a child, being left alone like that. Scars them. Makes them think a little differently, like they see the world through the bottom of a glass.”

“You think he’s wrong?”

Hook shrugs.

“Not sure what I think matters, Swan. But it explains what he’s asked me to do. In return for giving me the dagger, he wants me to kill her.”

Emma raises her eyebrows.

“And you don’t think you can?”

He shakes his head and let's out a puff of air that might have been a laugh.

“Oh no, I know I can. I will.” He says it casually enough, but his gaze is still fixed on the ceiling. “But you -”

“I’m tougher than I look,” she says, mildly offended, and the corner of his mouth quirks up slightly.

“And you look very tough indeed, but lass, this isn’t an adventure story. We won’t come out covered in glory. Only regrets and the blood of other people. I want better for you.”

“Maybe I want better for _you_ ,” she says, her hand creeping up his chest to cup his jaw.

She can feel the muscles twitch under her palm as he fights between the urge to press closer or pull away, so she rubs her thumb gently over his beard until he seems to decide, relaxing into her touch.

“I’m beyond saving, Emma,” he sighs.

She tightens her grip, turns his face to hers. “You can let me be the judge of that.”

They lie like that, noses almost touching, breathing each others air, for what feels like minutes. Emma finds herself cataloging every freckle, every eyelash, her fingers coming up to rest lightly over the cut he'd received in the battle with the knights back at the dock. It'll scar, she thinks, but she won't mind.

She has the sudden all encompassing feeling that she could look at him forever, scars and all.

“Why did you follow me?” he asks in barely a whisper, his eyes flitting hopelessly from her own to her lips and back again.

Emma smiles, and lets her hand move round so that she can run her fingers through his hair.

“Roland says you're my friend.”

He smiles back, genuine and soft, and shuffles his body just a little closer to hers, his hook resting cool and heavy on her hip.

“Oh yes? I'm not sure I've ever had one of those. What's that involve, then?”

“Nor me,” Emma bites her lip and watches his eyes flash dark. “But I think… Maybe something like this?”

It's a peck, a breath, just a lightning spark of lip against lip, but it's enough to send sparks flickering along her spine and set her heart pounding, and the little sound he makes - desperate and guttural right at the back of his throat - fills her with the burning need to hear him make it again, make him burn with her until he's hers and he’s hers and _gods she wants to keep him…_

The hammering on the door sends them flying apart, Hook landing ungracefully on the floor just as Roland bursts into the room.

“They've found you,” he gasps out. “The Knights. They've found the camp. You have to go, now!”

Emma scrambles for her clothes.

“They were following us?” she asks, furiously tugging on an overskirt. “Since when? We came by boat!”

“Not us, not as such,” Hook says, his face as grave as it ever was. “They're after this, still.”

He rests his hand on the dagger, and stares at her from under furrowed brows.

“There's still time to back out, Swan.”

“What?” Emma blows her hair out of her face and whips her cloak around her shoulders. “And leave you to get yourself killed? Not likely. You can't get rid of me that easily.”

“No,” he says with a hint of a smile. “I don't suppose I can.”

Roland looks nervously over his shoulder before beckoning them out of the door, the sound of shouting and the clash of ste echoing from somewhere below.

“Go North,” he says, thrusting something round and golden into Hook’s hand. “We’ll hold them off - keep going till first light and you should be safe a little while longer.”

“Oh, comforting,” Emma grumbles.

Roland flashes her a quick, apologetic smile before turning back to Hook.

“You won't forget what I told you?” he pleads. “You'll do everything as I asked?”

Hook nods once, then swings himself onto the nearest rope ladder.

“Coming, Swan?”

She spares Roland a smile and a friendly squeeze of his arm, and, taking a deep breath, she follows Hook into the unknown.


	5. Graceless Heart

**Ten Years Earlier**

His name’s Tom, and he's sweet.

He’s the blacksmith’s kid with a wide, goofy smile and hands just calloused enough to make her shiver. He’s kind, and gentle, and sometimes, in the dead of night, she dares to think about forever, and what that might feel like. Lets herself get carried away by some foolish, stupid dream where she never has to ask him to stay, and he does anyway. She dreams of promises kept. Of love. Of devotion.

Stupid.

She doesn’t think of it very often though, no. Doesn’t dare, not with the way her life seems to go. Mostly she thinks of this - of fleeing through the forest, every twig that snaps under her heel a threatened betrayal.

“And where, exactly, do you think you’re going?”

Emma skids to a staggering halt, her shoulders dropping in defeat before she turns to face her pursuer with her best approximation of wide-eyed innocence.

“Blue!” she tries for somewhere between surprised and delighted to see her guardian, but it comes out sort of guilty. She never was a good liar. “I was just going into town for some supplies.”

Blue lifts a perfect eyebrow and hums lightly.

“After dark? Dressed like that?”

She gestures to her attire. Emma runs a guilty hand over the beadwork on her stolen corset, and shrugs.

She probably shouldn’t have taken it, it was bound to be missed, but she’d so wanted to  watch the way Tom’s jaw would drop when he saw her - how he’d be speechless and hopeless and hers - but Blue doesn’t need to know that. Can’t know that.

Blue looks distinctly unimpressed, her mouth curling up into a sneer that makes her look cold and cruel, her eyes flashing with something old and unknowable that makes Emma look down at the floor.

“You look like a common bar wench,” she half spits. “What sort of ridiculous charade have you got yourself involved in?”

Emma bristles, tugging on the edge of the corset before snapping back with an angry gesture at Blue’s ample cleavage.

“That’s rich coming from you! Not exactly subtle yourself are you! Who are you trying to impress anyway? Don’t you _hatch_?”

“Oh?” says Blue. “And who are _you_ trying to impress, Emma?”

Emma shakes her head and takes a deep breath. “There’s nothing ridiculous going on. I met a boy. I - I love him.”

Blue sighs, and folds her hands neatly in front of her, eyeing Emma warily.

“Really?” Blue says knowingly.

“Yes, really! You’d love him, Blue, I promise.” Emma steps forward and takes one of the fairy’s hands in both of her own, Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe -

Blue pulls her hands free of Emma’s, and Emma’s heart drops.

“There’s been enough of this nonsense, Emma. The blacksmith’s boy won’t be waiting.”

“W-what?”

“You heard me,” her voice turns calm, soothing, and she rests her hand on Emma’s bicep. “He’s gone.”

Emma struggles to stay upright as all her breath seems to leave her in one terrible gasp, her tongue catching and trembling as she tries to speak.

“Tom? He’s - he’s dead?”

It feels like she’s been slapped - no, punched - right in the solar plexus, her heart hammering away at the bruise left behind until the pain of it makes her stumble forward into the fairy’s embrace.

“No, no my darling,” Blue soothes, a hand on the back of her head. “Not dead, just gone away. I wanted to tell you, but - “

Emma pulls back, her hair sticking to her wet cheeks.

“Tell me what?” she whispers.

“Why that he wasn’t the one for you, of course.” Blue wipes away a tear with the pad of her thumb, and smiles. “I just want what’s best for you, Emma. You know that.”

Emma shakes her head and takes an awkward step back, her eyes narrowed.

“Did you - did you say something to him? Did you make him leave?”

_Did you make him leave me?_

Blue smiles again, small and certain, and Emma knows. She knows.

“I can’t make anybody do something they don’t want to do, Emma. It’s against the rules.”

Liar.

“They’re your rules,” Emma says, still eyeing the fairy with distrust. “You could break them if you wanted to.”

“Could I?” Blue sighs, shaking her head again and reaching for Emma’s hand. “It doesn’t much matter does it? Come home, Emma. Come home with me.”

Blue’s right. It doesn’t much matter, after all where else can she go? So when Blue beckons her to follow, she does.

* * *

 

They haven't spoken. Not about the dagger strapped to his hip, not about the suicide mission they've apparently embarked upon, not about that kiss, or where it would have led if Roland hadn't come barrelling in with doom nipping at his heels. Not about anything at all.

They've traipsed through the night, never keeping to a straight path, and shared nothing between them but heavy breaths and torn off chunks of the rough loaf Emma had snatched from the tree-house table.

It's not uncomfortable, not exactly, but she has the sense that the longer they're silent the larger that silence grows until it becomes a thing with wings and weight that can carry them away or crush them as it chooses.

“I can hear you thinking,” he says from two steps ahead of her.

”No you can't,” she huffs, ducking under a branch that he lifts out of her way.

”I can. You're terribly loud about it.”

”Fine. I'm thinking. Mainly about how the hell we’re going to get out of this mess.”

”Oh I thought that was all in order,” he says brightly. “Do in the Evil Queen, exact my revenge, you go back to… whatever it is you do when you're not giving me fits of nerves. Maybe you could start up a career as a children's entertainer with that new found skill of yours?”

Her magic fizzes in her palms, almost as if it can hear him. She scowls at his back.

”And what are you going to do, after you've completed your vengeance and made an appropriately dramatic victory speech?”

He stops and looks back at her over his shoulder, and she sees that flash of fear again before he schools his features into something approaching smug.

”Ah, so that wasn't the mess you were referring to, then?”

”I don't know what you’re referring to.”

He drops the pretence, his lips twisting guiltily as he reaches for her arm.

”Swan -”

“Don't.” She shifts away from his outstretched hand, crossing her arms protectively across her chest. “If you're just gonna pretend - you know what?” She breathes out heavily, uncrossed her arms and focuses on the woodland ahead. “We don't have time for this, forget it.”

“Maybe I don't want to forget it.”

He's half glaring at her, but the sincerity seems to ring right through to her bones.

“Hook -”

“Killian.”

She blinks at him. “What?”

“Killian,” he gives her a soft smile and a tiny, encouraging nod. “That's my name, you know. You've used it before.”

She opens and closes her mouth wordlessly for a moment before letting her shoulders drop and her arms drop to her sides. He watches her cautiously, as if she's a wild animal and he doesn't know if she's going to fight or flee.

Nor does she, really.

“Killian.”

Before she'd only been trying to snap him out of his senseless blabbering, but now she takes her time, draws out the sounds and lets them roll over her tongue. He watches the way her mouth moves and she can feel a frisson in the air - a nameless something that seems to be dragging them together even as they stand still.

And then a flash - a spark - and the awful dawning realisation that the something isn't nameless at all.

He steps toward her, then freezes, his hand half outstretched, fingers splayed in the act of what? Reaching for her? Pushing her away? She trembles, ever so slightly, and waits for him to make his move.

He doesn't, standing stock-still as the spark grows brighter and brighter until she's half cowering away from it.

"Oh Emma. Won't you ever learn?"

The voice is soft and honeyed, almost soothing. Impossible. Hook - Killian - seems to sway in time with the words until his eyes roll back and he drops to the floor.

Emma spins on the spot, fingernails biting into her palms, her furious face turned to the sky.

"Blue? Blue! I know it’s you!"

There’s a laugh like a thousand tinkling bells, and the Blue fairy grows larger and ever more blinding until she stands over Killian's crumpled form, no different, no older than the last time they'd seen each other. Just considerably more alive.

"How did you..?" Emma swallows, disbelief coursing through her and making her hands shake as she gestures to the fairy. "I thought you were _dead_!"

"Well," Blue pats at her skirts and smiles. "Luckily for all of us, you were mistaken."

Her face grows serious, and she reaches out to lay one small hand on Emma’s shoulder. A shudder run through her at the touch, not her magic this time, not as far as she can tell, but instead something stronger and far more familiar. Betrayal.

Emma gapes at her, at the woman who’d been her only mother. At the woman she’d lost and grieved for.

At the woman who, in the end, had been just like everyone else. Who’d left her.

“Lucky? I’ve spent five years, five _years_ , roaming the forest with _nothing_ , no home, no family, no one to care if I was alive or dead, and now you’re _here_?” she shrugs off the hand and steps back, back until the trunk of the nearest tree stops her progress. “Why didn’t you come find me?”

“I’ve been watching from afar and - “

“From afar?” Emma balls her hands into tight, painful fists. “You _knew_? You knew how alone I was and you just _left_ me?”

Blue sighs, looking down at her feet and then back up at Emma, but there’s no contrition in her expression. “Emma, please. Don’t be like that. I couldn’t, not before.”

“But you can now?” she hisses, and she can feel the words burning at the back of her throat, desperate to escape, “ _Now_ , when I’ve finally - “

Blue lifts an eyebrow.

“Finally what?”

She stops and swallows the words back down, instead shifting her focus to where Killian lies, still as death and with his arm still reaching for her, at Blue’s feet.

“What did you do to him?”

“The _pirate_?” Blue stares at her, aghast, and Emma stands a little straighter. “What business do you have with him?”

Emma folds her arms, defiance in the jut of her chin.

“None of your business.”

“It’s everyone’s business!” the fairy shoots back. “Emma, you have a destiny, a role, you can’t just - “

“Oh can’t I?” she pushes herself off the tree until she’s toe to toe with the other woman, the terrible stillness of Killian’s chest within her line of vision. “Tell me. This destiny, this future of mine you were always on about, did it have something to do with magic?”

Blue blinks, briefly discombobulated, before plastering on a gentle smile.

“You know? Oh dear child - ”

Emma snorts, interrupting before Blue dares to appeal to the child she used to be.

“Oh, I know. You can’t have been following all that closely. Or was me being run through by Black Knights all part of this _destiny_?”

Blue shakes her head.

“The prophecy states - “

“Fuck the prophecy!” Emma spits, then drags a shaking hand over her mouth. “I don’t need you, or your stupid prophecy. I make my own destiny. Now wake him up, and get out of my sight.”

Blue sighs, and seems to be barely restraining herself from rolling her eyes.

“Emma, I understand that you’re hurt, you’re angry, but there are more important - “

“No!”

Sparks explode from Emma’s fists, a riot of golden light that illuminates the shock on the fairy’s face.

“No,” she says again, calmer, but with a voice like iron. “I’m not a child anymore. You’re not my mother. You gave up that right when you left me to rot, just like the woman who birthed me. I decide what’s important now. Wake him up. And leave.”

“All right,” Blue acquiesces. “I’ll leave. I’ll wake the pirate. But believe me Emma, you cannot run from your destiny, and as for him,” she looks down at Killian as if he’s something particularly unpleasant that she’s stepped in, “don’t get too attached.”

She takes Emma’s chin in her hand, forcing her into making eye-contact.

“It takes more than one good deed to balance the weight of a man’s heart, Emma. Don’t forget that.”

She drops her hand, and then, in a flash of light, she’s gone. Emma drops to her knees at Killian’s side, his name escaping her in bubbling little sobs as she shoves at his shoulder.

“Killian - Killian - wake up, wake up.”

Nothing happens, his face still lax and grey as she holds it in her hands.  

“Come back. Come back to me. Please.”

A tear drops onto his cheek and his skin pinks beneath it, twitching ever so slightly. The colour spreads until, with a heaving breath he sits bolt upright, his hand already reaching for his sword.

“What the bloody hell is - Swan! Are you okay?”

She scrubs her fist against her eyes to force the dampness back, and nods weakly. Killian gets to his feet, but her knees don’t seem to want to unbend from the forest floor and he has to wrench her upright with all the dignity of a sack of potatoes.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

She lets out a shaky laugh, half afraid to look at him - to have him look at her - in case Blue’s magic has lingered, waiting to ruin everything for her the moment she dares to believe in happiness again.

“I pretty much have.”

She brushes the dirt from her skirts before meeting his concerned gaze with her own. His cheek is bleeding again, and she runs her fingertips lightly beneath where the scab has cracked and broken..

“Are you okay?” she asks as his eyes follow the movement. “You seem to be getting knocked about a bit lately.”

He holds up his hook, waving it as her with a wry grin.

“Hardly the worst scrape I’ve ever suffered, love. Now are you planning on telling me what’s going on?”

He says it softly enough, but there’s something in his eyes - some steel, some anger that she can’t quite place - that makes her think twice about answering him. Hook is behind those eyes, she thinks, not Killian. Something distrusting and secretive. Something she recognises better than she should.

A pirate and a thief not trusting one another, what a turn up for the books.

And then he blinks, and the pirate’s gone. Only a soft gaze and gently parted lips left in his place.

“Just an old friend making a very, very unexpected appearance.”

Killian looks unconvinced, tilting his head as if trying to get a read on her.

“Excuse me, but someone knocked me out cold. You have very odd taste in friends, Swan.”

Well, he isn’t wrong. She smiles, biting on her lip slightly as she shimmies closer to him, her hands plucking at the lapels of his coat.

“Oh, I think my taste’s improving in time.”

He looks down at her hands and then up to her face, his eyes dark and his expression bordering somewhere between disbelief and lust before he swallows hard and gently, terribly gently, pulls her hands free and steps backwards.

“Swan - I - about earlier…”

He looks torn, bereft almost, but Emma can’t really bring herself to care about that, not with rejection burning white-hot down her gullet and sticking behind her breastbone. She forces her shoulders back and smiles at him, a false, feral sort of smile that has that concerned look back on his face in moments, but she doesn’t have time for it, not now.

Not if he doesn’t want her. (Nobody ever wants her.)

“What about it? Come on, we can’t stay here, who knows who’s about to appear out of the bushes if we don’t get a move on.”

She turns away from him, ready to lead them onward to wherever the hell they end up, more concerned with getting away from those blue, blue eyes than with directions, but he grabs her - catches her - his hook curved around her wrist as he tugs her back to face him.

“No, Swan. Listen. You’ve always been different - ” he begins, his tongue darting out to wet his lips.

“That’s one word for it.” she huffs, attempting to pull herself free - half-heartedly at least, most of her attention is still on the dampness of his lips.

“Emma,” he sighs, closing his eyes briefly as if wishing for strength before looking her dead in the eye. “I never thought I could feel this way again, not after losing Milah. Not until I met you.”

The ache in her chest drops like a stone sending her stomach roiling and making her feel faint and lightheaded, as though all the blood in her body has rushed to where it’s pounding in her ears.

“What - what do you mean?” she asks, and he looks at her as though she must know - surely knows - and it’s all she can do to shake her head, confusion lining her brow and making her mouth dry.

“Stubborn, impossible woman,” he laughs, but there’s something brittle about it, just at the edges, as if he’s on the brink of tears. “Don’t you know what you’ve done to me?”

Her hands feel hot, heavy, almost as if they might be glowing, and she leans forward until she’s close enough to run them up his spine, until they’re buried in his hair, and she imagines they are glowing - bright with the magic they kept from her - until the dark strands swallow them up. A final fuck you to the fairy eyes she knows must still be watching.

“No,” she says, swaying against him until her next words are breathed against his mouth. “Perhaps I’d better do it again.”

She swallows her own name as she kisses him, presses her body against his until he’s having to hold her up, his hand in her hair and his hook on her thigh. She hitches her leg up higher, as high as her ridiculous skirt allows, as she runs her tongue against his and wishes fervently that she’d thought to steal some breeches.

“This would have been easier in that bed,” she garbles out as he hoists her against the nearest tree trunk, somehow holding her in place and rucking her skirts up around her waist at the same time. “Less splintery.”

He groans something into her neck, something to do with beggars and choosers, but then his teeth are worrying over her collarbone and his hook is at her laces and his hips are twitch, twitch, twitching against her and she doesn’t care. Doesn’t care about splinters or watching eyes or prophecies or anything at all but for the way he’s so hot against her and his wrecked little groan when she rolls her hips against him.

She does it again, because by the gods she loves that noise, only for something to dig uncomfortably into her inner thigh, cold, and hard and, well, kind of sharp.

“Killian,” he thrusts his hips a little harder and she bites back a squeal, tugging at his hair. “Killian!”

He pulls back just far enough that she can see the flush that’s spread across his cheeks and the way his smile makes his eyes dance.

“Sorry, love,” he pants. “Not the place?”

“I don’t mind the place,” she says, arching her back slightly so that her breasts press against his chest. “It’s what’s in your pants that’s the problem.”

His eyebrows shoot up.

“Well that _is_ a first.”  

Emma tries to groan, but it sort of fades out into a giggle at his mock-offended expression.

“Not that, stupid,” she says, nipping at his bottom lip for good measure. “The other long, hard thing you’re keeping under your belt. I like a little danger, but still. I draw the line at daggers, okay?”

It’s like there was a candle burning behind his eyes, bright and happy, and she’s just snuffed it out. He drops her gently to her feet and then takes two long strides backwards.

“Of course,” he says, too softly for it to be meant for her ears. “Of course, I almost forgot.”

“Hey,” she steps back into his space, her hand going to rest on his heart of it’s own volition. “What’s wrong?”

He smiles, but it’s joyless now. False.

“Nothing’s wrong, darling. But we’d better not hover. We have a way to go yet, and there are still people on our tail.” he winks, and her heart skips a beat. It’s wrong. “Wouldn’t want to give them a show, would we?”

“No, I suppose - ”

“Come on, Swan,” he takes something from his pocket - the round golden thing Roland had given him - and holds it in the palm of his hand. It’s a compass, the needle pointing right through her. Due north. “Destiny awaits.”

He heads off into the dawn, and she follows him. Dread weighing her every step.

He doesn’t look back.

* * *

 

The dungeon torches cast strange shadows across her face, give her deep hollows under her eyes, and make her skin look as unnatural as his as they stare each other down.

“She chose him,” she says. “Just as you said she would.”

The Dark One presses up against the bars of his cell to pluck at one of the roses on the fairy’s bodice, his face twisted in glee. The Blue Fairy watches his fingers warily, but says nothing else.

“And that’s it is it? All you have to report?” he tuts sadly. “Was it not the happy reunion you were hoping for?”

“It’s not important,” she says, but her voice cracks and he leans in further, his breath hot and as it runs over her face.

“Oh, but it does, doesn’t it! You grew fond of our wayward princess!”

He drops back on his haunches and laughs gleefully, wagging one long finger in his companion's face.

“Their destinies are entwined now, fairy. There’s nothing you or I can do about it.”

Blue stiffens, eyeing his finger with distaste.

“As long as Emma is where she needs to be, I don’t care about what happens to the pirate.”

“Oh!” the Dark One lifts his finger to his lips. “But you should, dearie! Because I care - I care very much about what happens to Captain Hook. And rest assured your little _Savior_ had better not get in my way.”

“She won’t.” Blue draws herself to her full height. “We’ll see to that.”

“See that you do,” smiles the Dark One as the light overtakes her. “Because if you don’t. I assure you, I will.”


	6. Kings and Lionhearts

Dawn breaks, and so does the tree line, the thick woodland that’s sheltered them as they've trudged through the night giving way to broad, sandy pathways, scattered with the detritus of regularly used thoroughfares. A broken cartwheel here. A half fallen down waystation there.

It’s still early enough that Emma’s not especially concerned about coming across any fellow  travellers, but Killian is skittish, keeping to the edges where the trees still provide some shelter. She can practically see his ears twitching as he listens for the sound of approaching hooves.

They’re in the Queen’s realm, now, already in her personal army’s bad books and intent on Regicide. Emma can’t exactly blame him.

As they follow the road the settlements increase, or at least, their corpses do. Scorched thatch looms from around every bend in the track, every village well brackish and green. By the time they come to rest in the ruins of a smithy, the pitiful remains of a half-starved goat spread between them, they're both grey-faced, their chatter muted.

Before, in the sanctuary of the trees, kissing him felt like coming to life. A great big fuck you to those who've held her down for so long. Lust, maybe, or something like it, thrumming through them both until every breath cries freedom. Joy.

Here joy would feel sacrilegious; the whole world is like a graveyard now.

“What happened here?”

Killian looks up from his portion of stringy meat and sighs heavily.

“They don't call her the Evil Queen because of her charming persona, Swan.”

“I know that,” she hisses, “but - why would you do this to your people? How can you be their queen if they're…”

She stops, her words caught in her throat as she catches sight of something in one of the cottages across the way. They’re all battered in some way, roofs scorched or missing, windows broken, but still recognisably somebody’s homes. There are clothes mildewing on lines strung between the trees, a bucket dropped in the dirt by the undrinkable well, and, in the doorway of that one cottage, a small, still, foot.

She stares at it aghast, until Killian catches on and gets to his feet. He rises slowly, like an old man, and it makes her want to cry.

“Dead?” Killian shuts the door of the smithy, a pathetic effort since the door itself is only three pieces of warped wood and a rusty old latch, but one she appreciates nonetheless. “Perhaps fear suits her better than adoration.”

Emma feels suddenly, cripplingly sick. She’d heard, of course she’d heard, everybody had, of the many cruelties of the northern realm’s ruler. Her youth had been full of whispered conversation about the indignities faced by people she’d never met, of Blue’s sad eyes and the other fairies’ defeated faces.

“It won’t always be like this,” Blue had whispered to her in the dead of night when she thought she was sleeping. “One day you’ll save them, Emma.”

_Save them._

It might have taken twenty eight years, but finally something seems to click into place.

_Save them._

She didn’t.

She must have spoken out loud - or maybe she doesn’t need to -  because suddenly Killian’s almost on top of her, pulling her into his embrace as she starts to shake, her voice trembling.

“Blue told me, she told me but I -”

“It’s not your fault, love. It’s not your fault. She’s mad. She’s always been mad.”

“But Blue -”

“Blue?”

Emma pulls back, offering him a shrug and a watery grin.

“The old friend who was a bit heavy handed with the knockout juice? Blue.”

“Sounds like a fairy name,” he says, a note of caution creeping in as he dips his head to meet her eyes.

“Well, it would,” she huffs, trying not to notice the way he balks slightly at her sort-of confession.

(Blue always did have a bit of a reputation, after all.)

“I thought they were extinct, at least in this realm,” he says, and his expression darkens. “I was told the Dark One had wiped them out.”

Emma thinks of blood on the grass, the way hair smells when it’s been burnt, and swallows the bitterness of her words as best she can.

“Well, that makes two of us.”

Killian gives her that knowing look again, one lost soul to another, and she shuffles back into his arms. It's warmer, for sure, but honestly she doesn't really need an excuse.

“What other stories have you heard?” she asks, and he lifts his eyebrows.

“About fairies, or in general? A few to make your hair curl, for sure.”

“I very much doubt that,” she says with a snort. Then, softer, “Humour me with a fairy tale will you?”

He smiles, and it warms her more than any fire ever will.

“There was one tale you might find interesting. I spent many years in another realm, one where time didn't pass in quite the same way as it does here. When I left, the fairies were a powerful race. Their magic was feared and coveted in equal measure, and they held many great rulers in their thrall. But when I finally returned,” he pauses, something like guilt in the way his throat bobs, “I tried to seek them out. I wanted - well, it doesn't matter what I wanted. I could never find them. There were whispers that they'd gone into hiding. That they were protecting someone. Someone who would one day rule us all, kind, just and fair. A _saviour_.”

“And you didn't believe that?”

“I preferred not to. Not much of a one for authority, me. And anyway, the Dark One killed them. Every last one.” he mock winces, rubbing at the back of his head. “Or so I believed, although the lump your friend left on my skull suggests otherwise.”

“Do you think the people who lived here believed?” she asks, the body in the cottage doorway seared into her mind’s eye. “Were they waiting for someone to save them?”

_Were they waiting for me_?

She doesn't say the words, just lets them thunder through her blood, hammering on the inside of her skull making her hands shake and her stomach roil. Is this her destiny? To be the one who could have stopped this carnage and didn't? To fail without ever knowing she needed to try?

Killian looks about at their battered surroundings and shrugs, a gentle thing, but it makes her heart ache.

“I don't think it did them much good if they did,” he says, and then bites his lip, looking at her through narrowed eyes as if trying to put together a puzzle with three pieces missing. “They say the saviour’s as beautiful as the sun, and twice as deadly.” He taps his lips with one finger, humming lightly. “Sounds like my sort of woman.”

Despite herself, Emma laughs.

“Oh they say that, do they?”

“Aye,” he grins. “And that she strings unsuspecting men up for pleasure.”

“If I was stringing you up for pleasure, you’d know about it.”

She’d left him the opening on purpose, but it still makes her stomach swoop when his eyes darken, his voice dropping low as sin.

“Oh, I don’t doubt that for a moment.”

The heat in his eyes and the answering flare in her belly distract her for a moment, but then she shakes her head, trying to clear her brain to make space for far less pleasant thoughts.

“You can’t possibly think - not really - that those stories are about _me_?”

“In so much as I believe in anything, Swan. I’d rather you than anyone else.”

It seems surreal, an orphan girls dream come true, and she can't believe it. Not really. Doesn't dare believe it. But Killian keeps looking at her like a wanderer might a map and a part of her, a tiny, long buried part of her, wants him to be right. Wants to be needed. Wanted.

“When I was a child there was this old woman who’d visit sometimes,” she says, the words feeling thick on her tongue. “She used to tell me stories about a princess and a prince and how their true love could break any curse. How they'd always find each other. About how their child was born _special_.”

She stops, the childish wish still feeling too stupid to say out loud, but Killian finishes the thought.

“You wanted to be that child, didn’t you? But you couldn't believe her, didn't think you could be special,” he says, and her jaw drops.

He grins.

“Open book, love.”

Emma shakes her head sharply.

“It was just a story.”

“Was it.”

It's not a question, she realises, no hint of doubt in his voice, and it's suddenly all just too too much. She practically leaps to her feet, pacing the length of the smithy, her arms flung wide as she reaches the battered door and spins to face him.

“Look at this place. As if I could be anybody's _saviour_.”

He stands too, slowly as if afraid to startle her, and reaches out to wipe a sudden tear from her cheek, his face impossibly softer, kinder, than she's ever seen it before.

“Oh,” he says, “I don't know about that.”

“I didn’t think you were the hope speech type.”

Killian smiles at her, giving her a little nod that makes her heart feel as though it’s swollen up by about two sizes.

“It’s hardly a matter of hope. I've yet to see you fail.”

“Oh gods,” she drops to the floor, her head in her hands, the goat threatening to come back up at any moment, “you think it’s me.”

“Doesn’t matter what I think,” he says, a cold certainty in his words that forces her to look up.

She frowns, reaching to take his hook in both her hands and squeezing until the metal warms under her palms.

“It does, you know. It really, really does.”

He sighs, and bends so that he can lift the back of her hands to his lips, the soft kiss he drops there making her flush.

“I do love that I can still make you do that,” he says mildly, as if they haven't just been discussing the meaning of, well, her life, at least.

“Do what?”

“Make you blush like a maiden,” he winks and she steels herself for the comment she knows is coming. “Especially when I know exactly what you can do with that t-”

“Okay!” she snaps, pulling her hands back. “That's enough of that!” She bites her lip and smiles slightly as a thought occurs to her. “Should you be talking to me like that? If I'm a princess of the realm, I mean. Seems like you ought to be paying me your respects.”

Killian grins, and offers her a swooping over-the-top bow before holding out his hand to help pull her to her feet.

“Why princess,” he says, rolling the word off his tongue with far too much pleasure, “Why break the habit of a lifetime?”

* * *

 

Regina makes a show of preening into the mirror, patting gently at her well-coiffed steel grey locks, and admiring the way her lips still curl so beautifully as the watches the squirming reflections of her men.

Two of her useless knights are held to the wall by invisible chains, their faces red with strain, a third on his knees between them blubbering desperate nonsense in a plea for his worthless life.

Pathetic.

Perfect.

“I left the boy be for his father’s sake, as I -” she swallows hard, the word poison on her tongue, “swore I would, and this is how he repays me? Paying off some pirate to kill me in my sleep? How dare he!”

“Please, your majesty,” the free knight burbles, “if I may say, the Hood boy has been allowed to -”

“You may not say!”

The fireball fizzes out dangerously close to the head of the restrained left hand guard, the man on his knees beginning to whimper as his queen strides over to loom above him.

“The boy has no appreciation for your benevolent mercy, your Majesty!” he wails. “Just say the word and we will teach him a lesson he won’t live to regret, we will - ”

“Children,” she spits, “are ungrateful little wretches, but you will do no such thing. The boy is simply confused. Afraid. Tough love is so difficult to understand, but so necessary, don’t you think?”

He nods, desperately, and she smiles.

“Did you at least learn anything about my would-be assassin? Does he have the dagger?”

“Yes, your Majesty,” wheezes the right-hand knight, “and the girl - ”

“Do I look,” she turns on him with a sneer, “like I care about some forest dwelling whore?”

“No, your Highness, but this girl - she has magic.”

“And,” the left hand knight joins in, “there are rumours! Whispers of fairies out in the woods!”

“Impossible.”

“Not so, my queen,” simpers the final knight. “I have seen it with my own eyes. She has strong magic - untrained. If the stories are true…if the fairies are truly back…”

He peters off, as if suddenly realising that nothing good could come of being the bearer of bad news, but Regina smiles, sly and small.

“Dear old Blue. Seems Rumple couldn’t be rid of you after all. You!” she gestures and the left hand knight drops to the ground, clutching at his throat, “Bring me the girl and the dagger and I might let you live to see another harvest.”

He struggles to his feet, nodding frantically.

“And the pirate?”

Regina turns back to her mirror, adjusting the cuffs of her dress as she sits at her vanity once more.

“Kill him.”

* * *

 

The sun is high in the sky before they find civilisation, or, at least, whatever passes for it out here in this northern wasteland. The animals wandering the road look better fed, and are quick enough to escape Emma’s attempts to trap them, so when they see the smoke rising from the chimneys of the next village they don’t hesitate before striding into the town square, Killian with his hand in his belt and Emma flipping her hair out of the collar of her cloak.

“Hello!” he bellows. “Anybody home? Weary travellers require sustenance! Will kill evil rulers for food!”

Emma elbows him in the side.

“Do you have any subtlety? Like _at all_?”

He looks at her with his eyebrows raised high and a daft, half-giddy sort of smile on his face.

“Darling, have you _seen_ me?”

“Oh I’ve seen plenty, Captain,” she shoots back, looking him up and down for good measure, before offering him a quirked brow of her own. “What’s gotten into you all of a sudden?”

“Plenty of self-confidence, that’s for sure,” says a dark-haired man as he ducks out of the doorway of the closest cottage. “Seems the rumours are true, after all.”

Killian growls, going straight for his sword, but Emma stops him with her hand on his bicep.

“Rumours?”

“Indeed,” the man smiles, and offers her a deep bow. “That your taste in companions leaves something to be desired, your Majesty.”

“You what?”

The man smiles again, and she can feel the heat of Killian’s gaze on her cheek, grounding her even as the stranger’s next words take her world and turn it utterly, irredeemably, upside down.

“Princess Emma. Welcome home.”

The stranger’s name is Pinocchio. He fetches them platters of bread and meat that she can’t bring herself to eat that are served at his table by pale, ragged villagers who stare at Emma with wide eyes as she practically rips a flagon of wine from the man offering to pour, clutching at it with both hands as Pinocchio tells them his story.

It's the story of an infant princess hidden away by fairies as her parents’ kingdom came crashing down around their ears. Pinocchio’s own father had been present that day in the castle, the day that the Evil Queen’s forces finally overwhelmed the garrison of Princess Snow and Prince James, had died defending the throne room while the Princess gave birth.

Gave birth to _her_. The Princess Emma, fated to finally defeat the Evil Queen and bring peace to the realms. A ruler. A saviour.

The flagon is a hell of a lot lighter when Killian finally pries it from her white fingers, her disbelief not quite drowned in claret.

“Are they dead?”

She asks so quietly that at first Pinocchio doesn't seem to realise she's spoken, only Killian’s gruff _the lady asked you a question, mate_ making him take notice.

“Prince James and Princess Snow. Are they dead?”

Pinocchio looks down at the ground, and Emma feels a stubborn stab of guilt. His father's dead, died defending the kingdom in an unwinnable war, surely he doesn't care about the fates of some royals. Of her parents, apparently, though she never met them to care.

“I don't know,” he says. “I hope not. My father always said, where there's life, there's hope.”

“And if there isn't?” Killian asks.

“Life?” Pinocchio shrugs apologetically. “Then I guess hope’s all that's left, isn't it.”

“And I'm it,” Emma says. “Your hope. Your saviour. You think it's me.”

Pinocchio smiles again, and she wonders how saviour-like it would be to slap him.

“I know it's you, Emma.” he says, and there’s something a little desperate in his tone. “We’ve been waiting for you for a very, very long time.”

Twenty-eight years, if his tale is to be believed, and he’s very insistent she’d know if he were lying. (She would, but for some reason she doesn’t think that’s what he means.)

“For a vote of confidence that's not making me feel very reassured,” she says, shuffling closer to Killian as the memories of her encounters with the Black Knights come barrelling to the forefront of her mind. “What about Regina, does she know that I'm… this saviour person?”

“I don't know, she wasn't supposed to, that's why the fairies planned to keep it from you until the time was right. But it's been years and she…” Pinocchio shudders, “she has ways of making people talk.”

“Oh wonderful,” she sighs, turning to Killian. “Looks like I might have to borrow that stupid knife of yours.”

He goes to speak, but Pinocchio gets there first.

“It might not come to that,” he says with a sort of false jollity that sets Emma’s teeth on edge, “there was a time when she was - not good, exactly - but at least a little more restrained in her destructive tendencies. Maybe there’s a way to end this without more bloodshed. That’s what your parents would want.”

“Not possible, I’m afraid,” Killian finally says, lifting the dagger from his belt and dangling it in front of Pinocchio’s astonished face. “See, I’ve promised a gentleman that I’ll see that woman’s blood on my hook. Swore on my honour, y’see, and all for this little knife here. I trust you recognise it?”

Pinocchio’s lips curl into a sneer.

“Are pirate’s renowned for their honour?”

“This one is,” Emma snaps. “And as for my parents, their approach didn’t do them much good, did it?”

Pinocchio laughs, but it’s sharp and humourless.

“Is that why he’s carrying that thing around then?” he says, gesturing to the dagger, “Is that your new approach? What, you plan to use the Dark One as your attack dog? Many men and woman have tried that tack before, and I can assure you not one of them remains to tell you about it.”

“The Dark One killed the woman I loved,” Killian says, as matter-of-factly as if he were discussing the weather. “I swore revenge. Revenge I’m mere days from taking. If I take vengeance for another’s loss on the way then it’s all the better in my opinion.”

“That’s how she began,” says Pinocchio. “The Evil Queen. She lost love once and she destroyed a Kingdom for her vengeance. It didn’t make her happy. Only love did that. And now she’s lost it again - ” he closes his eyes briefly, and Emma sees Killian’s eyes flick to the dagger before he seems to steel himself, his shoulders stiffening and his mouth setting in a hard line.

“It’s different,” she says, struggling against the sudden unexplained lump in her throat. “Killian’s not going on a rampage.”

Killian smiles, but he doesn’t look at her and it doesn’t meet his eyes.

“That rather depends who you ask, love.”

Pinocchio watches him warily, his eyes flicking between the dagger and the other man’s face.

“You plan to kill the Dark One,” he says. “Do you know what that means?”

“Of course I know what that means,” Killian scoffs, and he sounds just like the pirate she remembers. It makes her heart ache, her mouth suddenly dry, her eyes pricking with tears that she can’t quite understand..

“I don't know,” she half whispers, reaching out to hold his arm and feeling the way his muscles tighten under her touch, “Kilian, what aren’t you telling me?”

“You going to tell her?” Pinocchio asks, “Or are you going to let her find out the hard way?”

Killian’s grip tightens on the dagger, and for a moment she thinks he might be tempted to use it, but then his shoulders slump, his eyes downcast, and she can feel him begin to pull away.

“Killian?”

He looks at her, and it feels like goodbye.

“Emma -”

There's a scuffle outside - the sounds of hooves mingling with the frightened shouts of the villagers - and Killian stuffs the dagger back into his belt.

“Is that the arrival of the hard way?” she asks, the accusation tempered by fear as the shouting intensifies.

“Well,” he says, offering Emma his hand before turning to face the door, resigned. “I suppose best find out.”

* * *

 

She might have thought that she’d get used to being knocked out - it certainly seems to have happened enough lately - but her body clearly hasn’t got the memo. Her vision swims, shadows and light twisting and blurring until it finally settles into the thick lines of a cell’s bars, flickering torchlight setting her head pounding as she forces herself to sit upright.

Her cloak’s long gone and there’s a damp chill in the air, the straw beneath her smells vile, her head’s pounding, and she’s alone.

She can't remember much. There'd been knights, three or four - perhaps more - and there'd been Killian, sword drawn, and her bread knife at a man’s throat, and he'd laughed -

_Good form, love!_

He'd been so proud of her, then. She'd seen it, could recognise it even though she's not sure anyone's been proud of her before, and she felt the rush of warmth and affection and, gods, _love_ for him so strongly it had made her rock on her feet, her hand loosening on the knife.

And then. And _then._

She remembers the sword at his back, the flash of her magic, Pinocchio disappearing into the woods, then... nothing.

Nothing but the burn in her fingers and the taste of blood in the air.

(The look in his eyes when he realised what she'd done.)

It hurts, and she can feel her heart speeding up, her breaths coming quicker as she realises that she’s captured and locked away and _alone, alone, alone._

Everybody leaves her. Everybody.

_I’m not leaving you._

Everybody.

(It doesn't hurt any less when it's your own fault.)

“Stop it,” she hisses to herself, digging her fingers into the stone beneath the straw and clenching her teeth. “Stop it, you can get out of this. Don’t panic, don’t -”

“What a lovely pep talk!”

She bolts upright at the voice, practically throwing herself at the bars of her cage and craning her neck in an effort to see the speaker. The corridor itself is bare except for one baleful looking rat, but beyond it, on the opposite side, there's another cell not unlike her own.

“Oh no, don’t stop on my account,” says the voice, and Emma narrows her eyes to try and make out the shadows moving behind the bars. “Why, I feel quite motivated myself!”

There's a clang of metal that sends Emma reeling backwards, and then a man, small and twisted, his skin like old leather and his eyes glowing in the darkness, is pressed up against the bars opposite, every rotten tooth on display when he grins.

“Hello, dearie. I've been waiting for you.”


	7. Raise Hell

 

The grey cloud that engulfs him isn’t smoke, but he chokes on it all the same.

Bloody Hell.

Bloody _Hell_.

Bloody bleeding fucking _blithering_ Hell.

His sword is still in his hand as he scrambles to his feet, he can still feel the prick of the Black Knight’s own sword point in the hollow of his back, can still see Emma - beautiful and fierce as she takes down trained knights with little more than a bread knife and some well-aimed kicks - and yet he’s alone. A man out of time, ripped from the battleground at the moment of truth and deposited into the cool, dark sanctuary of the forest.

He ought to be grateful. Relieved, even, since he’s been saved yet again at the very cusp of death, the dagger safe at his waist and his vengeance still at hand. And yet.

_And yet._

 

* * *

 

Killian Jones is a pirate, and pirates know the value of many things. He knows how the judge the weight of gold, the carat of rubies, the price of a human life, and how the exchange rate varies from realm to realm and in the face of desperation.

He knows of lands where women are brought with chests of diamonds, and oceans where children are traded for oars. Where you can buy a man’s loyalty with a bean, and the price of love is but dust on the eastern winds.

Perhaps that is why he has never been a man prone to fear. He'd learned in the dank bowels of a merchant ship just how worthless fear was. Fear of the lash never made it hurt less. Fear of the dark never made the monsters disappear. In fact he can probably count the number of times he’s been truly terrified on the fingers of his remaining hand, each moment of terror followed by the most dreadful loss. His father, Liam, Milah.

_Emma_.

He hadn’t even had time to care about the sword at his back, not with her looking at him with wild, frightened eyes, his name on her lips and magic at her fingertips.

He hadn’t had time to warn her about the man rising at her side, the rock in his hand, before she’d wrapped him up in the grey, swirling cloak of her magic to keep him safe. Saved his thrice damned soul at the cost of hers, an exchange so unbalanced that even the pirate in him balks at the cost.

He jams his sword into the ground, and leans on the hilt to keep himself upright, his knees traitorously weak beneath him. His brow is damp and he can feel the sticky warmth of blood running from under his hairline, the result of a sharp jab from the hilt of a knight’s sword. He can almost hear Emma's commentary - the sly dig at his age, the concern masked by flirtation. He closes his eyes and for a moment, just a moment, he can feel her too cold fingers at his temple. Smell the sweetness of her hair.

But he opens them, and she's gone. Gone without knowing his true age, his real mission, the way this story was always bound to end.

If he'd told her, maybe she'd have left him to die.

(She wouldn't, he knows, and that's the most fucking frightening thing of all.)

She's a hero - born to it, in fact though she may not have known before tonight - but she's more than that. Pushed to the limits of legality by circumstances beyond her control, a princess in stolen rags who could steal your coin purse and your heart in one night - a single smile from her enough to cast a man adrift, the promise of another his only life raft.

He's not a hero, though he might have been once, long ago. Maybe he could have been again, had circumstances allowed. Perhaps with Emma at his side and the crocodile dead by another’s hand, he could have let Hook die. Could have allowed himself to become Killian Jones again, the darkness in his heart growing ever softer  in the way it had begun to in the quiet of the forest.

But Emma is gone, and softness will not save her. Softness won’t save either of them, in the end.

There’s only one thing for it. Only one man ready to face what lies ahead.

The last act of Killian Jones starts with the sheathing of a sword, and Captain Hook strides out into the forest.

 

* * *

 

He’s travelled only a few hundred yards in what he hopes is the direction of the village when he begins to sense that he’s being watched, a faint electricity in the air that he recognises as either the threat of thunder or the gathering of many magic users.

It would seem Emma’s ‘old friend’ has renewed her interest.

He draws his sword to make a point, more than anything. There’s fuck all such a weapon could do against the powers of the fae should they choose to attack, but it makes him feel better at least.

And if he can make a fairy bleed dust at the end of his cutlass for the crime of betraying Emma?

It’s not like he’s going to live to regret it, is it.

The buzz seems to increase in frequency - higher and higher until he’s almost wincing from it - and then, abruptly, it stops. He stops too, dead still in the centre of the track, and listens. All is still for a moment, even the creatures of the forest seem to be holding their breath, and then there’s the sound of leaves underfoot,  panting coming somewhere from his right, a rustling in the bushes, and speaking of traitors -

“ _You_!” he snarls as Pinocchio comes rolling out of the undergrowth, his face red from exertion and his breath coming in gasps. “Did you send word? Are you working for her? Tell you tell them that we - that Emma - ”

Pinocchio winces, putting his hands up to his head in a gesture of supplication that is enough for Killian to realise he has his sword pointed at the man’s jugular.

“No, no I swear,” Pinocchio pleads. “I didn’t - ”

“You left her,” Killian doesn’t lower the sword, instead pressing forward so that the tip is millimeters from Pinocchio’s jumping pulse point, “slithered off into the woods like a snake, and left your _princess_ to suffer! I should slit your throat right here as a traitor to the crown!”

Pinocchio winces, but then manages to catch his breath enough to scowl up at Killian.

“Says the pirate! What do you care, anyway?” he looks to the dagger with a sneer. “You’ve got what you wanted.”

“What do you know of what I want.”

“Enough to know you were never going to tell her, were you.” Killian's silence is answer enough, and Pinocchio’s sneer becomes vindictive. “To think, the saviour could have been shackled to a man so determined to be consumed by darkness, the contrast is quite poetic really. Did you think a bard might sing about you two one day? Did you think you could ever be good enough?” Pinocchio scoffs. “She was always meant for better than you.”

A part of him - the part that pushed her away in the forest, the part that dreams of her at night - agrees with the coward’s words, but the anger is far louder.

“You profess to speak for her? You, who know nothing of the person she truly is?”

“I know enough,” spits Pinocchio. “I know the stories -”

“Stories!” Killian bellows. “Entertainment for children and simpletons!”

“They're more than that,” Pinocchio growls. “They're a promise. They're hope. A happy ever after for my people.”

He scoffs, dropping the sword to his side.

“ _Your_ people.”

“Yes,” Pinocchio draws his shoulders back, finally meeting Killian's eye. “We've been waiting a long time, Hook. It's time for Emma’s destiny to play out.”

“And what part would you play in these little tales, hmm? That of a treasonous snake without even the bowel control to keep his people's saviour from harm? If anything happens to her I swear I'll -”

“Kill me?” Pinocchio half smiles, resigned. “I expect you will, regardless. The Dark One isn't known for his tender mercies.”

“It isn't the Dark One you should be worried about,” Killian spits, but the venom is gone, consumed by a cold, empty ache that only seems to grow worse the longer he's apart from Emma.

“Oh, isn't it?” Pinocchio looks down at the dagger, then back at Killian, a smirk playing around his lips. “You could have fooled me.”

He doesn’t know what does it - maybe it’s the smugness in Pinocchio’s tone, or the flash of fear he’d spotted when his eyes had flicked to the dagger - but his next words are out of his mouth before he even realises he’s going to speak them.

“Tell me,” he says, smiling at the strange rush of power the words give him. “Would you care to make a deal?”

 

* * *

 

Emma staggers back from the bars in shock, her feet slipping against the damp flagstones.

The man - the _monster_ \- watches her in amusement with wide, yellow eyes, his skin glinting, scale-like, in the flickering torchlight.

“How do you know my name?” she manages to ask, hating the way her voice cracks and shakes.

His smile grows wider and crueller still.

“I know a great many things, Dearie.”

Emma forces her hands into tight fists and her chin high, confident that at least there are two sets of iron bars dividing them.

“And you are?”

He taps his lips with one long, yellowed fingernail.

“Names, names, names. Such funny things. Powerful, don't you think? Interesting.”

He giggles, and Emma wrinkles her nose up in distaste at the sound.

“If you say so,” she says,

“Oh!” He flings a hand up in the air. “But I do! I, for one, have many names. Tell me, Emma,” he presses his face even further between the bars, his face rat-like in its shrewdness, “would you care to take a guess?”

He sets her teeth on edge, all the hairs on the back of her neck rising along with the fizz of magic up her spine. She doesn't need to know danger’s name to recognise it when she sees it.

“Forget it,” Emma huffs, as dismissively as she can.

His voice turns higher, sweeter, cloying.

“Oh don't be like that, dearie. Go on. One little guess,” he wheedles.

She narrows her eyes.

“Why are you in here?”

He scowls, and somehow it makes him look far more human than his smile.

“So many questions, so few answers. Your friend,  he's always ready with an answer. Such a quick wit. Shame he wasn't quite so quick with the sword, isn't it?” The man tuts sadly, his head tilted in mock sympathy. “A lady like yourself should be careful who she associates with.”

“That's rich, coming from a guy in prison,” she grumbles, then stops, her jaw dropping. “Wait, you, you're -”

He nods, and somehow it's still more creepy than encouraging.

“Yes, go on.”

“The Dark One,” she hisses, her fingernails biting into her palms. “You're Killian's crocodile.”

“Killian, is it? How terribly romantic. How is the pirate? Suffering dreadfully I hope?”

“Don't talk about him,” Emma growls. “He's told me about you, I know who you are.  What you are.”

“Oh he has, has he? Has he told you how he  humiliated  me? How he stole my  wife from me? Took my son’s mother away, hmmm?” The Dark One’s spittle sprays into the space between them. “Did he tell you how he laughed in the face of a desperate man? How he made me _beg_?”

“He told me how you killed her,” she snipes back.

“To save my _son_!” he bellows.

“That's not true,” Emma says, shaking her head. “You killed her because she didn't love you, because she loved him.”

“Isn't it?” he gasps slightly, then leans forward, forward until Emma's sure the bars must be about to snap under the pressure from his clawed fingers. “Look into my eyes, Emma. Have I told you a lie?”

“Killian wouldn't…”

But the words trail off in nothing. Killian wouldn't what? Agree to murder a woman on the say so of a bandit? Thieve and murder to get what he wants?

She remembers the strange looks Pinocchio had given him, how he'd seemingly been quite happy to have a random pickpocket tagging along on his little quest.

A pickpocket saviour. A pickpocket saviour he's led right to the Evil Queen’s dungeons, opposite the man he's spent forever trying to kill. How convenient that suddenly appears.

What a deal that would be. What a treasure.

What a price she'd be to pay.

Killian wouldn't.

(Captain Hook might.)

“Wouldn't he.” The Dark One looks almost pitying now. “He's looking for me, isn't he. And when he finds me here, captured, defenceless, what do you think he's going to do?”

“I don't -”

“No,” he says, falling back on his heels in satisfaction. “You don't, do you. That dagger he carries, do you know what it does?”

Emma tamps down the sick feeling of betrayal, and turns her fear outward as anger.

“How do you know about the dagger?” she spits.

“It's got my name on it, do you think I'd be so foolish as to let such a weapon go unless I wanted it found, hmmm?”

“You know he's coming to kill you.”

“I know he's coming to try.”

“And you're going to what - let him?” she scoffs. “Do you have some sort of death wish?”

“Hardly, dearie. But it's not me you're worried about is it? That dagger might control me,might even kill me, but by doing so - ” he tuts again. “The Darkness needs a vessel. Where do you suppose it might go? Unless, that is, you’d be willing to help me out? How about a little deal - just between us, hmm?”

He lifts non-existent eyebrows, and the sinking betrayal in her gut flips and twists into something worse - something far far worse. Her breath comes short, lights dancing around the edge of her vision as it finally dawns on her what’s happening here, what Killian’s planning to do.

She imagines him cruel, joyless, his eyes turned wild and feral like the creature before her, and feels the heat of angry tears on her cheeks..

“Don’t you dare,” she spits. “Don’t you  dare  do that to him!”

“Me?” he gasps. “He’s doing it to  himself . So if you help me, Princess, maybe you can save your pirate’s worthless life.”

“How?”

It comes out more broken than she’d like, a sort of half-sob that she’d be ashamed of at any other time, but now all she can feel is the thud of her heart and the way her blood sings his name.

Not him. She’s lost everybody. She won’t lose him.

“ _How_?”

The Dark One laughs, brittle and high, until she throws herself against the bars, his hysterical face cast in shadows by the opening of the dungeon doors. Two knights march in, arms full of chains and their faces grim as steel as they approach her cage, but she pays them no mind, her attention fixed on the laughing beast opposite.

“ _How_?! ”

“Her Majesty desires an audience,” says one of the knights as she struggles against his attempts to clamp the chains around her wrists. “Really Miss, this will be much easier if you - AH!”

Emma manages to wrench her arm free as the knight shakes the bite marks from his hand and flings it out to the side, magic in her fingertips, but then the other knight forces her arm high behind her back, her magic fizzling out under the cold weight of the chains.

“We’ll do it the hard way then, shall we?” hisses the second knight, and kicks her sharply in the back of the knee.

She crumples half to the floor, swearing bitterly and the knights use her bonds to drag her out of the cell and along the filthy corridor, the Dark One watching gleefully as she stumbles over the cobblestones.

“Don't you fret, Princess. Your knight is on his way!”

She can still hear his giggling, even as the dungeon doors slam shut behind her.

 

* * *

 

The Hood boy had pressed the golden compass upon him with far more intensity than was really required - what sort of a pirate would turn down treasure, after all? - as a payment for his services as an assassin. A promise on a pirate’s honour clearly not quite enough to assure him of Killian’s allegiance.

He’d spun some tale about how it's needle would always point you to your deepest desire, and Killian had thought at the time that Roland seemed to expect that it would be used to track down hidden treasures, as if Captain Hook needed some gaudy magical trinket in order to fill his coffers.

He’d almost laughed in his face. No desire, no mere trinket, could ever overcome his longing to skin the crocodile.

(Then Emma had pressed herself against him in that narrow bed, her hair damp from her bath and her skin fragrant as bluebells, and for a moment he’d let himself wonder. He wonders now if Roland might have been on the right track.)

“One golden compass, guaranteed to lead you to your deepest desire,” he tells Pinocchio who is watching the sway of the compass in front of his face with wide eyes. “And in exchange, all I ask from you, is a guide to the Queen’s castle.”

“Won’t it lead you there?” Pinocchio asks.

“Unlikely,” Killian shrugs. “And I’ve no time for detours because my stomach’s decided it’s deepest desire is for stew. Plus,” he smiles, wolf-like, “I think I’d like to keep my eye on you.”

“You’re a fool,” says Pinocchio, and Killian bows.

“Well noticed. Known for your observational prowess, are you? Must come in handy when finding the best places to hide.”

“It’s pointless, the Queen - ”

Killian rests his hand on the handle of the dagger, and lifts his hook into the air, letting it catch the light as he turns it too and fro in front of Pinocchio’s pale face.

“Do you think,” he says, “I have reason to be fearful of the Queen?”

“We all have reason to be fearful of the Queen,” Pinocchio snaps. “She’s powerful in all the darkest magics, she can hold men under her sway - ”

“No woman can hold me under her sway,” Killian snaps.

“Yeah?” Pinocchio scoffs, “If you say so, Captain. But I’m not the one sacrificing myself to save a girl who’ll want nothing to do with me.”

It takes every ounce of self-control Killian has not to reach out and wring Pinocchio’s neck.

“Do not speak,” he hisses, “of things you do not understand.”

“Oh,” says Pinocchio, “I understand, all right. Believe me, if there’s one thing I understand it’s the lengths people will go to for love. That’s what got us all in this state in the first place.”

“And it’s made you a cynic?”

“Better it had made you a cynic than a dead man.”

Killian draws his hand over his brow, barely restraining a groan. This circular conversation isn’t getting him any closer to rescuing Emma, and it certainly isn’t filling him with confidence that she’ll still be speaking to him should he survive the experience.

“I don’t intend to die tonight.”

“Your intentions won’t matter,” says Pinocchio with odd gentleness. “If the Queen doesn’t get you, you’re fated to defeat yourself.”

“Riddles and nonsense,” Killian sneers. “Now will you take my deal or not?”

Pinocchio takes a deep breath.

“Yes, I’ll take you to the Queen’s castle, but before we leave, you must know - the saviour isn't the only powerful magic user she has trapped in her dungeons.”

“Emma was raised by fairies,” Killian says. “That can only be to our advantage.”

“It’s not a fairy,” says Pinocchio, and his eyes fall once again to the dagger at Killian’s waist.

The world stops, just for a moment, as a wave of relief so powerful rises up in him that he’s momentarily afraid he may weep. His revenge, Milah’s justice, is mere hours away. He can already feel the crocodile’s blood soaking his sleeves, taste the victory in his last pathetic gasps for air, feel the magic take root in his soul.

Sense Killian Jones drown forever beneath the darkest of seas.

See the loathing in Emma’s eyes.

He presses the compass into Pinocchio’s hand, and his voice doesn’t waver.

“Deal.”

 

* * *

 

With Emma at his side, Killian had found the forest to be an almost a magical place. She’d lit up the trails and pathways with her presence, her steps as sure through the wooded glens as his had ever been on the boards of his ship. She’d been at home here, almost ethereal with her long skirts and her bright hair, like one of the old forest goddesses of legend. A goddess who swore, and stamped her feet, and killed rabbits with a twist of her long elegant fingers, sure enough, but all of that had just made him the more willing supplicant.

Now she’s gone, and his companion is far less beautiful and considerably less impressive, and he’s reminded of just how very much he hates forests. He hates how dark they are, even when he knows the skies above are clear. He hates the squelching of mud underfoot and the faint smell of animal piss that lingers in the bushes.

He hates how the ground never sways beneath him, and the way his heart is lurching in his chest.

Although maybe that’s not the forest’s fault, that last one.

“This is as far as I go.”

“You truly are a coward, aren’t you?”

“Certainly am, and alive to enjoy it.” “I’d wish you luck, but I suppose that’s rather pointless.”

Killian shifts so that the weight of the dagger is no longer against his thigh.

“You suppose correctly,” he says, and if Pinocchio notices his movement then he never mentions it. “You’ll keep up your end of the deal?”

Pinocchio nods once, his brow pinched in what Killian interprets as being half effort to appear genuine, half discomfort.

“I swear,” he says.

Killian reaches out and claps his hand on the other man’s shoulder, pulling him closer so that their faces are mere breaths apart when he says, all pleasantry:

“I’ll know if you don't.”

“I'll take that as my cue to leave,” says Pinocchio, doffing an imaginary cap. “If you'd care to hold up your end of the deal..?”

Killian drops the compass into Pinocchio's outstretched hand with a sneer.

“I suspected you were the mercenary sort.”

Pinocchio makes no reply to the accusation in Killian's tone, merely pocketing the compass and turning immediately back for the woods.

“Good luck on your vengeance,” he calls over his shoulder before the trees swallow him up. “Hope it's worthwhile.”

Killian doesn't bother with the courtesy of answering, his narrowed eyes already fixed on the Evil Queen’s home.

The castle is certainly imposing, it’s sharp towers and care surroundings remind him of a keg of gunpowder blown too early and left splintered and torn in the circle of its own destruction.

The dagger hangs heavy at his waist, Pinocchio’s snide words and Emma’s frightened eyes vying for his head space as his concentration narrows down onto a small unguarded chute protruding from the castle wall.

He'd risk his life for love or vengeance, all right. And vengeance is at hand.


	8. What We Deserve

One thing is for certain, Emma's first meeting with royalty is not quite what she was expecting.

The throne room is cold and dank, the cobbled floor and flickering torches seem more suited to a prison than a castle. There a few concessions to royalty here and there - some huge, poorly rendered oil paintings of dead eyed ancestors that peer down from the damp stone walls, a long wooden table set with a single set of gleaming silver cutlery, and, on a dais at the very back of the room, a large opulent velvet throne in which her majesty lounges, her legs carelessly thrown over the arm of it, with a smile that reminds Emma of nothing so much as a panther watching its prey.

At least she knows what her role is supposed to be.

The knights drop her, pushing her a little as she falls so that she ends up almost prostrate at the foot of the dais, just at eye level with her boot clad feet.

They swing down, first one and then the other, so that the toes are right in front of Emma’s face.

“Well?” drawls the Evil Queen. “Didn’t your mother teach you how to greet royalty?”

Almost as if a great invisible hand in pressing down on the back of her head, Emma finds herself bowing even further, her face inches from the polished leather.

“Oh that's right,” the Queen croons, and Emma's head snaps back until she can see the viciousness of her smile. “She didn't, did she?”

She chucks a finger under Emma's chin and she wants to move - wants to fight or scream or something - but she's frozen in place, her breath coming in short sharp gasps as the Queen's other hand balls into a fist.

“Oh,” she says, leaning down so that her face is inches from Emma’s. “What’s that? Nothing to say? Pity.”

The Queen stands up swiftly, and Emma falls back, scrabbling across the floor to get away and clutching at her throat.

“You know,” sighs the Queen, “I thought you’d be better than this.”

She lifts her hand and flames spark in her palm. Emma squeezes her eyes shut, waiting for the feel of fire searing flesh. When nothing happens, she risks opening one eye just enough to see the fireball hovering in midair, the Queen’s face nonplussed.

Her blood sings, and she scrambles to her feet, her hands flexing at her sides. The fireball fizzles out to nothing and the Queen’s expression turns dark.

“Defensive magic,” she spits. “Is that how you plan to defeat me?”

“No,” Emma says without thinking, “I was planning on stabbing you through the heart.”

“Well that rather presumes I have one, doesn’t it,” the Queen sneers. “A nice little weak spot for you to exploit, that would be convenient wouldn’t it? Unluckily for you, I paid attention in my lessons.”

She reaches a hand into her own chest, Emma stares horrified at the sight, and then pulls it out - empty. She wriggles her fingers in the air, her lips curled in laughter.

“Never bring your heart to a witch fight.”

Emma gapes. She’s never seen such a thing - could barely have dreamt it possible - but then she remembers Killian’s face in the firelight, and the way his voice had cracked and stumbled over the words.

How the Dark One murdered the woman he loved. How he _crushed her heart_.

Reflexively, her hands come up to protect her chest. Regina grins, her eyes glittering. 

“Oh don’t worry, Princess. I’ve much more thrilling plans in place for you.”

 

* * *

 

He waits until dusk falls and the sky bruises purple-black with the threat of rain, to creep out of the loaming, counting the steps of the two guards as they continue their circuit around the castle walls.

He's been watching for hours, or so it feels, making note of every deviation, every cough or moment taken to piss against the stonework, until he knows their every step, can predict their every move.

_Is it always violence with you?_

How little she’d known him then. How little she still does.

He withdraws his sword from the first man’s stomach with a wet squelch, ignoring the splatter as he spins to bury his hook in the other guard’s jugular.

They collapse in a bloodied, twitching heap at his feet, but there’s no time to do more than wipe the gore off on his coat before he’s breaking through the small wooden door he’d chosen and  striding up the stone staircase within, destruction in his wake.

There will be no safety in numbers for the Queen’s guards this night. No mercy given by the callous Captain Hook as he dispatches them beneath blade and hook.

No quarter.

He can feel it already, the darkness creeping up on him as each step takes him closer to his inevitable conclusion, the taste of iron in his mouth a not unfamiliar distraction from the fear he stamps down with every thrust and parry.

By all the gods, he is afraid.

Not of his own death - no that's been a long time coming, a debt to the universe long unpaid - but that he might not live long enough to see Emma come to hate him, and hate him she must.

He'd give all the gold he's ever plundered just to know she’ll live to loathe him.

“Do you love her?”

He spins at the top of the staircase, swearing bitterly as the point of his sword stops inches from the woman’s neck.

She watches him with cold, calculating eyes, and even if she weren’t wearing something a whore wouldn’t be seen dead in he’s still know her for what she is.

“What do you want, fairy? Haven’t you done enough?”

“Perhaps,” she says, “perhaps not. Have you, Killian Jones?”

“Don’t call me that,” he spits. “That name’s not for the likes of you.”

“Just for Emma?” she says, and nods, her chin bobbing closer to the sword. “Perhaps she was right. Perhaps there is more to you than meets the eye.”

“I have no time for your ridiculous mind games,” Killian growls. “Emma needs me.”

“Does she?” Blue takes a half step closer, moving the sword away from her neck without touching it. “Then I ask you again, pirate. Do you love her?”

“Yes.” he doesn’t hesitate, the word falling from his lips before he even thinks about forming it. “Yes. More than she will ever know.”

The fairy smiles at that, still cold, but with the hint of something else in the curl of her lips. 

“Then listen very carefully, Captain. There’s something you may need.”

 

* * *

 

Her magic burns through her, drops of blood glistening on the throne room floor and wiped haphazardly on the edges of her cape from where she’s burst a blood vessel in her nose, her face screwed up tight in concentration as Regina prowls around the edges of the wavering protective bubble she’s managed to conjure.

“Aren’t you bored?” Regina calls, reaching out a finger and sending flames skittering over the bubbles surface, flames that Emma feels like lightning against her skin. “I’m bored. Know any other tricks, Saviour?”

“How do you know I’m the Saviour,” Emma pants. “It was supposed to be a secret.”

“Oh those dwarves of your mother’s never could keep their mouths shut, and anyway,” she learns forward to leer directly at Emma, “you have your father’s chin.”

She send off another wave of fire and Emma bites her own lip, hard, to keep from screaming.

“Such a sweet boy,” muses the Queen. “I wonder whatever happened to him.”

She laughs, delighted, and Emma sees red.

She throws herself at the Queen, the protection spell collapsing around her as she pulls every ounce of feeling to a single point within her and then -

She lets it out.

The Queen flies across the room, landing with a crack against a huge oil painting of a man dressed in green and tearing it clean in half as she slides, crumpled to the floor. Emma stands over her, chest heaving, and the Queen smiles, spitting blood at her feet.

“Oh,” she says, “you’re going to pay for that.”

She lifts her hand, and Emma realises a moment too late that she’s defenseless, exposed, her magic not yet controlled enough to come at will as the Queen forms another fireball. She juts out her chin, determined to die on her feet at least, the Queen’s lip curls and then -

The fireball splutters away to nothing.

“Now, now dearie,” sing-songs a horribly familiar voice, “you’re not the one who collects debts around here.”

The Queen roars, launching herself away from the wall with flames licking at her fingertips, but the Dark One just laughs, a tinkling, terrible thing, and sends her flying back against the torn portrait, the ragged ends forming themselves into thick vines that wrap around her wrists and ankles.

Emma backs up against the wall, her hands out in front of her.

“How the hell did you get out?” she spits.

“Why, at the hand of our mutual friend,” he says. “That is what you call the enemy of your enemy, isn’t it? A friend?”

The Queen struggles against her bonds, spitting like a trapped cat, almost feral in her helplessness.

“I’m not your enemy!”

The Dark One smiles, cruelty in the play of his hands as gestures to himself.

“Well dearie, you kept me locked up in a dungeon for the best part of a year. Hardly the way to treat your oldest pal now is it?”

The smile drops away, and he lifts his hand, the fingers white as they claw at the air. The Queen splutters, then gasps, tearing at her own throat with wide, frightened eyes. Emma can’t look away, the opportunity to flee for her life slipping away as she stares, half aghast and half terribly, ghoulishly delighted at the Evil Queen’s rapidly purpling face.

“What are you - you need me!” she wheezes, furious and desperate, and something within the Dark One seems to _snap_.

“Need you?” he shrieks, dropping his hand and thundering towards her as if he intends to squeeze the life from her flesh on flesh. “I needed you years ago! I needed you to find my boy for me! But no, you failed me. You failed me like you always fail. Well now I’ve found something stronger than your lust for revenge, Regina. Something that’s going to bring me my son back.”

There’s a thunderous cacophony outside the doors, and Emma realises just a moment too late that she’s missed her moment to run, the Dark One and the Queen both turning their attention toward her as screams echo from somewhere down the corridor.

“Her?” Regina hisses.

“Never,” Emma says, her head held high, her chin jutting out. “I’ll never work for you.”

The Dark One shakes his head, tutting in disappointment.

“Lets test that theory shall we?” he say with a toothy smile, tilting his head as the sound of crashing metal gets closer. “After all, maybe something will make you reconsider.”

“Not likely,” Emma snorts.

If the Dark One had eyebrows she’s sure they’d be somewhere in his hairline from the incredulous look he gives her.

“Oh really? Not even him?”

‘He’ bursts into the throne room, sword drawn and chest heaving, his eyes wild and hair blood slicked. He looks like a madman - is a madman - but Emma can’t help the way his name falls from her lips like he’s the answer to her every prayer.

“Killian!”

“Swan?”

Killian freezes, his eyes flicking between Emma and his crocodile. The Dark One claps his hands together in glee.

“Isn’t it romantic! True loves reunited! I’m quite overcome, you know.”

The Evil Queen manages a snort, somehow still superior even when helpless.

“The pirate? True love? Now I really have heard it all.”

“You!” Killian growls, his sword trembling slightly as he points it at the Dark One’s heart. “Emma, keep away from him he’s - ”

“Yes, yes dearie,” the Dark One says with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I’m afraid you’ve missed the introductions, we’ve moved on to act two.”

“Which is?”

“Why your _very_ timely death, I’m afraid.”

Emma tries to bolt forward, her magic finally answering her call, burning through her bones as she tries to reach for Killian, but it’s like running through molasses, her legs heavier than she’s ever known, each step a desperate, futile struggle to reach him.

“Don’t,” Killian pleads. “Emma, don’t.”

“But my magic - “ she pants, “Killian - ”

“Don’t,” he grits out, his gaze fixed on the Dark One’s skeletal grin. “You need to run.”

“I’m not leaving you,” she cries, and just for a moment his eyes meet hers and she feels her heart shatter.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice perfectly calm even as his eyes betray him. “I love you.”

(No one. No one _ever_ -)

“Oh yes,” hisses the Dark One gleefully. “Love’s young dream! The most powerful magic of all, would you believe! And if there’s one thing I know how to use, it’s _magic_.”

He lifts his claw-like hands toward Killian, and for a moment they all seem to just watch, stupefied, until Killian collapses to the floor, his sword clattering away as he in turn claws at his throat.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for this,” sighs the Dark One. “I was hoping it would be a little more satisfying - wait, I tell you what - ” he lifts his hands, and Killian rises, limp and grimacing, his arms held out strangely at his sides like a marionette with it’s strings cut. The Dark One smiles, and narrows his eyes. “Pick up the sword, pirate. After all, a man unwilling to fight for what he wants - ”

He twists his wrists, and Killian spins on the spot until he’s facing Emma, the sword flying through the air to settle in his hand.

“- deserves what he gets.”

The sword slashes through the air, and Killian take one, two, three long unsteady steps towards her.

“I won’t,” he grits out, his eyes squeezed tight shut in distress. “I won’t!”

The sword flashes again, and Emma jumps back, acutely, horribly, aware of the stone wall at her back.

“Oh won’t you?” titters the Dark One. “How funny, I thought you wanted to kill me. Wanted to _be_ me.”

“I’ll never be you,” Killian spits. “I’ll die first.”

The Dark One’s eyes widen and he turns to Emma, delight and malice fighting for dominance in his expression. “You heard him. He wants to die first.”

Her magic thrums, and she clenches her fists so hard her fingernails draw blood.

“Just do it,” Killian growls, “Swan, just do it. I know you can.”

Realisation twists sharply through her like a sword to the gut - the sickening rush of dread and regret and love making her unsteady on her feet, her vision blurring.

It hurts like nothing’s hurt before - her very bones crying out in horror at just the idea of it - of losing, of _hurting_ -

“Killian _no_! I don’t want to - I can’t lose you!”

“You’ve got to!” Killian pleads. “He’s right I - I would become him. I was going to. I _wanted_ to. But you - you -.”

The Dark One makes a show of dabbing at his eyes.

“Look at them Regina! Perhaps we should give them their privacy? Or are you enjoying the show. I know I am.” he perches on the throne, his elbows propped on his knees and his chin in his hands. “But then again, a year’s a long time without entertainment.”

“I’m _not_ losing you!” she repeats, determination in the set of her shoulders, in the flare of magic along her spine. Something flashes blue-white in the corner of her field of vision, but she doesn’t take her eyes off him - not the sword, bloodstained and razor sharp - but the agonised blue eyes, the crumpled brow.

The man who loves her.

Her magic fizzles at the edges of her flesh, as if it’s as loathe to turn on him as she is, and the bubble she tries to form flickers and dies as the sword point comes to rest at the hollow of her throat.

“If it’s going to be one of us, it ought to be me - it’s no more than I deserve,” he’s struggling to get the words out, the strain clear in the lines of his neck and the tight clench of his jaw, but it’s the white knuckles she watches, the twitch of the hook towards his own forearm. “I wanted to be a better man for you, Swan.”

“No, no no no. You deserve _better_. You _are_ better!” she half sobs, the tears thick and cloying as she swallows them down, unwilling to let their audience see her cry. Unable to let him think she’s given up.

“You don’t know that,” he grinds out, the hook moving another inch closer to his sword arm.

“I know _you,_ ” she pleads, reaching out for his face, nausea rising up as he flinches away from her touch.

The Dark One rises from his throne, reproaching her with a wagging finger as he nears them.

“Now, now, dearie. Don’t get distressed. Are you ready to make that deal now?”

“What. Deal.” snaps Killian, his eyes flashing dark with rage.

She sees Hook in him then, the man she’d robbed and fucked and watched from afar, the terrible pirate captain that legends and widows are made of.

It changes nothing, only makes her plea louder, her plan more certain.

“Just let him go. Let him _go_.”

“Emma don’t - ”

The Dark One silences him with a flick of his wrist.

“Hush now, don’t talk for the lady! You want to save him, hmmm?”

Killian’s breath is harsh and his attempts to speak muffled under the Dark One’s spell, but she can still catch the drift of it. Can see how much he wants her to let him die in her place, and nods sharply.

“Anything,” she says.

The Dark One claps his hands in delight.

“Oh I do love it when they say that.”

A scroll appears in a swirl of red smoke, an ostentatiously plumed quill in the Dark One’s other hand.

“Oh dear,” he tuts. “I appear to have forgotten the ink.”

Emma can’t help the yelp that escaped her as Killian’s sword thrusts forward just a little, blood welling up and dripping red from where it breaks the skin at her collarbone. Killian shuts his eyes, but not before a single tear escapes down his cheek.

“Now now, Captain,” the Dark One says as he leans in to dip the quill into the fresh blood. “This is something you really ought to watch.”

Killian opens his eyes, but she can’t be sure whether that’s by choice or coercion. Nevertheless she keeps her gaze fixed on his as the Dark One presses the quill into her hand.

“The long-awaited Saviour, selling her skills to the Dark One” she can hear the grin in his voice even though she only has eyes for Killian. “A cautionary tale, I’m sure you’ll agree. How the mighty are felled by love. How weak you truly are, dearie.”

“Love isn’t weakness,” she says lowly, her words only meant for Killian, “it’s strength.”

_Don’t give up_ , she wills him. _Don’t give up._

She half imagines she sees him smile.

“Sign here please,” snaps the Dark One, as the contract - or at least she assumes it’s a contract - is thrust under her nose. “You and I have a lot of work to do, dearie.”

“You won’t hurt him?”

She sees the Dark One’s shrug out of the corner of her eye.

“Well, not immediately. He’s terribly irritating though, and tomorrow is another day after all.”

“Yeah,” she says, offering Killian a tremulous smile. “It is.”

The quill glows yellow-gold in her hand as she touches the tip to the bottom of the parchment and her magic swells, a sudden gasp of energy thrumming through her body desperate to escape, and she realises - realises all too late - that her life isn’t the price here.

It’s everything else. Everyone else, maybe. Everyone else for him.

In that moment, it’s not even a choice.

She scrawls an ‘E’, and the light grows blinding.

When it clears it finds Killian on the other side of the room, his hands on his knees as he gasps for breath, the Queen hanging limp and watchful in her trap, and Blue - full sized and dressed in her most glittering finery - with the Dark One in front of her, cowed like a recalcitrant knight at the feet of his ruler.

“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” she says smoothly. “Emma has a duty to this land.”

“You!” the Dark One hisses. “We had a deal! You promised me my _son_!”

“One you rescinded on as soon as you disobeyed my orders,” Blue says. “The price for my help -”

“Was what exactly?” Emma asks Blue, hot rage pricking at her eyes. “My soul? My magic? My _life_?”

“No,” Blue answers coolly, and she lifts her gaze to the Evil Queen. “Hers. That’s your destiny, Emma. It always has been.”

“You thought that girl could truly destroy _me_?” the Queen laughs, twisting in her bonds. “A pathetic, untrained little thing like that?”

“And yet she’s not the one hanging from the tapestries, is she Regina?” Blue says, and a tiny, cold little smile plays at the corner of her lips. “I’ve been waiting twenty eight years for this.”

“I did that,” howls the Dark One. “I played your game, I let this ridiculous pirate take my dagger, I let him guide the girl here just as you asked, and I, _I,_ am the one who defeated Regina _. Me!_ You owe me! We had a deal!”

Blue watches him seethe as though he’s a toddler throwing a tantrum, the hardness in her expression something Emma remembers all too well.

“We did,” she says. “And since your absence is preferable, I come bearing a gift.”

She reaches between her breasts and pulls out a silver necklace, and, on the end of it -

“A magic bean,” whispers Killian.

The Dark One scrabbles toward her on his knees, his hands outstretched.

“Is this..?” he pleads, and Blue nods.

“It is. A one way trip, Rumplestiltskin. Don’t make the same mistake twice.”

She tosses the necklace onto the floor, and watches as he crawls over it it, clutching it almost reverently to his chest. He looks up, and for a moment Emma sees a flash of the man he once was, lonely and sad and wanting only one thing in the world.

Love.

For a moment, she sees herself.

He closes his eyes, and releases the bean. A great raging green vortex opens in the centre of the throne room where it lands, and for a moment Emma’s terrified that they’re all going to get sucked in and spat out who-knows-where, but the Dark One reaches out for it, his voice breaking.

“My boy, oh my boy.”

He falls, his arms spread wide, and the portal closes behind him with an audible _snap_.

Killian slumps, and she wants to run to him, take him in her arms and never ever ever - but then Blue’s there, holding out her hand for something.

“You have it?”

Killian straightens his shoulders.

“I do,” he says, and reaches into the inner pocket of his coat. He brings out something that, at first, Emma assumes is a lump of charcoal salvaged from one of their campfires, but then, deep inside it, she sees the smallest flash of red.

The Blue fairy takes the Evil Queen’s heart, and smiles.

“Regina Mills,” she begins, addressing the Queen where she hangs, the heart held between them. “You have committed treason against this realm and against your own family. You are guilty of patricide, regicide, kidnap, murder and coercion.”

Regina sneers.

“Oh, and what are you going to do? Will you kill me, Rheul Gorm? Darken that sparkly little heart of yours?”

Emma steps forward, and snatches the heart from the fairy’s hand.

“No,” she says, turning to the Queen with a sneer of her own. “But I might.”

“Emma - “ Blue begins, but she’s silenced by a wave of Emma’s hand.

“This is my destiny, isn’t it? What you’ve been waiting all these years for me to do?” she shakes her head. “You wanted me a killer, Blue. So let me kill her.”

Blue looks for a moment like she might object, but then her gaze falls on the Queen and hardens once more. “As you wish,” she says. “Find me, after the deed is done. We have much to discuss.”

“Okay,” Emma says quietly as the fairy disappears in a burst of light. “Don’t wait up.”

She give the heart an experimental squeeze and the Queen arches, gasping for breath.

“Just do it,” she hisses. “Kill me. Let the last thing I see be Snow White’s precious princess turn dark.”

“You deserve it,” Emma spits, and tightens her grip. “You _deserve_ it!”

“Emma,” Killian’s hand is soft on her upper arm, but she still jumps, the heart slipping in her loosening grip. “Don’t.”

“Why not?” Emma is ashamed to find her cheeks wet, anger succeeding where terror could not. “You’ve seen the things she’s done, the people - the people she’s killed.”

“Aye,” he says gently, and covers the hand holding the heart with his own. “I have. So let me.”

“You? A pathetic lovesick pirate?” Regina scoffs. “Planning to show your little girlfriend the man you _really_ are?”

He smiles at her, the charming rogue once more, and Emma lets the heart roll from her hand to his.

“It’s really nothing personal your Majesty, at least, not for me, but you see, I made a deal with a young man. A young man whose father’s heart you stole.”

This shocks her, her face draining of colour and her limbs going limp.

“Roland? Roland sent you to kill me?”

Killian nods. “With kind regards from young Mr Hood,” he says, and lifts his hook.

Emma's whole world narrows to the pin prick of steel into charred flesh, the sounds of the Queen’s bitter howls fading away until all she can hear is her own blood rushing in her ears and a voice she doesn’t know that whispers _mercy_.

“Wait!” Killian stops immediately he hears Emma’s cry, turning to her in confusion, but she addresses the Queen. “His father. What happened to him?”

The Queen seems to sag, turning her face into the remains of the portrait as best she can.

“He - he died. It wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t! I loved him - he wanted me to be good and I tried, I tried - ” she stops, swallowing hard, her cheeks pin from the effort of keeping back  tears. “I didn’t steal his heart. He gave it to me. _He gave it to me_!”

“What about my parents - what about what you did to them?”

The Queen growls, her frustration evident.

“I didn’t kill your insipid parents. I tried, but they were always one stinking step ahead of me.”

Emma’s eyes go wide, her knees weakening so that she has to grab at the sleeve of Killian’s coat to stay upright.

“My parents aren’t dead?”

“Well they might be by now,” the Queen snorts. “How would I know. But _I_ didn’t kill them.”

Her parents aren’t dead. It echoes through her head, throbbing through her veins, her heartbeat replaced with two words over and over, her world tilting on its axis and being made new.

_Not dead. Not dead. Not dead._

“Killian - Killian my parents -”

_Mercy, mercy, mercy._

“Aye love,” he says, the heart still held tight between his fingers. “I heard.”

“We can’t kill her,” Emma says, with a sudden fierce certainty. “That’s not what Saviours’ do.”

Killian raises an eyebrow, but his smile is a soft, delighted sort of thing, pride tugging at the lines around his eyes.

“But the Blue fairy - ” he begins.

“Can do her own dirty work,” Emma says dismissively. “We don’t work for _anyone_ , agreed?”

“Oh with pleasure, darling.” he says with a grin, “but I do have a duty to the boy. Perhaps the Saviour has another punishment? Or the Princess of the realm, perhaps?”

He grins, and she nods shortly, turning back to the Queen with all the regality she can muster.

“Regina, I henceforth strip you of your lands and titles and banish you from this Kingdom to return on pain of death,” she says, willing the magic through her limbs as she lifts her hands, the Queen snarling as her palms start to glow gold.

“You should have killed me while you could!” she shrieks as the gold spreads and burns, reaching out to envelop her where she hangs. “You’ll regret this! You’ll regret this! I am the Queen! I will destroy your happi - ”

There’s a flash, an explosion of grey-white smoke, and the Queen vanishes.

“Yeah,” Emma says. “I doubt that.”

“Very impressive, love,” Killian says over the rustle of leather as he puts something in his pocket.

She drops back on her heels, wipes her sweaty palms on her cloak, and turns to Killian with a shrug and a smile that makes her face ache.

“Eh. I saw it in some street theater once.”

He steps closer until she can feel the heat of his body against hers, and reaching up to run his thumb almost painfully gently across her flushed cheekbone 

“I meant the mercy,” he says softly, and it reminds her of the way men speak in temples, hushed and adoring and awed. Easy pickings, she’s always thought. 

Weak.

Well she knows better now.

“Were you really going to become the Dark One?” she asks, her hands coming up to rug lightly at his lapels.

He winces and tries to shy away, but she only clings tighter..

“It wasn’t a life’s ambition, love. Merely an unfortunate side-effect of taking my vengeance. I thought if you knew -”

She shakes her head, not interested in doubt, fear, or recriminations right now.

“And now?” she asks, pressing her breasts against his chest and moves her hand to fiddle with one of the many chains he wears around his neck, watching the way his Adam’s apple bobs as she brushes lightly at his skin.

“Now what?”

“What’s your life’s ambition now?”

His answering laugh rumbles through her, warm and soothing, her skittish magic settling under his touch as he thumb at her chin.

“Give a man a chance, Swan.”

“Really? No ideas at all?” she asks coyly, rising up on her tiptoes to nip at his lower lip. “You can tell me.”

“Well,” he sighs against her mouth. “Perhaps one or two. Or five. Or twenty.”

“Hmmm,” Emma hums, licking at the seam of his lips and melting into the way he opens beneath her, the way he chases her mouth as she pulls back. “I can’t - oh. Oh _shit_.”

“What’s the matter love?” he mutters, still searching for the ghost of her kiss, his eyes heavy lidded. She gives him a little shake, her voice cracking.

“We just banished the _Queen_.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “I think that was all your doing, darling, but do go on.”

“I’m a fucking _princess_.”

He grins, and she knows he’s not going to sympathize with her sudden plight, not when he’s running his tongue over his teeth like that, not when he’s pulling her back towards him, crushing their bodies together and growling low into her ear.

“Would you prefer me on my knees, your highness?”

“Well, now you mention it,” she groans as he grinds his hips against her, before coming back to herself enough to slap lightly at his shoulder. “But not here.”

“No?”

She looks around at the dark, miserable throne room, at the torn portrait, the bloodstains on his hook, the fresh red at the neck of her cloak.

“No,” she says, soft but oh so certain. “Let’s go home.”


	9. Captured Ghosts

There’s little they won’t do for her, these people who are now her own.

They find Pinocchio hovering at the edge of the forest, and although he looks at Killian with nervous eyes he’s more than willing to lend them the maps they’ll require for the last part of their journey. He offers to guide them himself, offering Emma a floor scraping bow as he reiterates once again how his father was once one of her mother’s inner circle, but Emma feels the way Killian stiffens at her shoulder and shakes her head.

He offers to gather a retinue - volunteers to staff her new home, men for the army she’ll be expected to lead - and she scoffs at the idea. _She_ doesn’t need ladies-in-waiting, or a cook, or footmen to gossip in stairwells and dark corners.

“Maybe not, my Lady,” Pinocchio says with a wry smile. “But a Queen does.”

They make slow progress along the roads marked on Pinocchio’s map. Emma finds herself almost constantly mobbed by gangs of pathetically grateful villagers, all of whom seem to want to grab a piece of her clothing, a moment of her time, a word from the lips of the woman who’s banished the despot under whom they’ve suffered for so long.

There are decent meals, too. Offers of warm beds. Clean clothes and hot baths and the souls of their firstborns too probably, if she should ask for them.

It’s both nice and worrying in turns. The sheer joy of many of Regina’s ex-subjects is infectious, and in many places they are followed along the road by bands of musicians, dancers, small children who press flowers into her hands and beg to kiss her cheek, but in others their gratitude shifts into a darker, more bitter thing. Old widows who turn their faces away as she approaches, men who scoff as they tell their story, disbelief in the furrows of their brows. Hard-eyed women with scrawny children clutching at their skirts who ask the question she can’t answer.

_What took you so long?_

Killian stays by her side through it all, whether he’s riding beside her in a borrowed hay wagon or offering to lay his coat over puddles as they walk.

(She jumps in them instead, sending mud flying up their legs and the children into paroxysms of laughter, and he looks at her like she’s the sunrise and she doesn’t even mind.)

But it takes its toll, journeying through a land so cowed and desecrated and hers, and when a woman attempts to cut a chunk from her hair - only stopped from leaping onto Emma’s back with her homemade razor at the ready by Killian’s swift actions and liberal waving of his hook - she decides she’s had enough.

“What about your magic, love?” Killian asks when she starts to flag, her smile strained and her steps staggered. “You’ve transported us before.”

“I wasn’t thinking about it then,” she grumbles. “What if I get it wrong? We might end up anywhere.”

“And that wasn’t a concern before?” he asks, lifting an eyebrow.

She shrugs, turning to wave at some well-wishers so that he can’t see the unhappy twist to her mouth.

“It wasn’t my main concern, no,” she mutters.

“Well,” he says, pulling her into his side as the crowd push a little too close. “Leave it to me this time. I’ve got an idea.”

–

She smells the ocean before she sees it, the salt and tar traveling on the wind, bit even without that she’d know where they were heading just from the smile on Killian’s face and the way his steps grow lighter and quicker until, by the time the pine needles underfoot give way to sand, he’s practically jogging, Emma tripping over her skirts in an effort to keep up.

They burst out onto a spit of sand at the edge of a curving cove, a small natural harbor tucked against the mossy cliffs at the far side with a few rambling harbour side businesses alongside, their gas lights lit against the encroaching dusk.

“Why do I feel like this is going to end badly?” she asks.

Killian grins.

“I thought you liked adventure?”

“I like _you_ ,” she tosses back. “But I’m a princess now I can’t just go…” She gestures to where a few small ships bob gently on the waves. “Do whatever it is you do.”

“Well then don’t love,” he says, offering her a silly little bow. “I am at your service.”

“I thought we didn’t work for anyone anymore?” she says, swallowing a laugh.

“It’s not work,” he says lightly.

“Oh.” She lifts her eyebrows. “Duty is it?”

“Not quite,” he says, and his face takes on that too soft expression again, the one that fills her with a warmth she can’t control. “It’s you.”

They hold hands as they make their way along the beach, pausing only for Killian to rinse the old blood from his sword and hook.

“Don’t want to give the wrong impression,” he says with a wink as the water sluices away the evidence of death.

“Or the right one,” Emma says.

“That’s why you like me,” he says, and sweeps her up in his arms as if threatening to dunk her in the ocean - cloak and all - her laugh echoing off the cliffs around them.

(Like is not quite the word, she thinks. It’s not the word, but the right one won’t fall from her lips.)

He leaves her in an old tavern right at the harbors edge, with a flagon of rum and a mug of weak ale for ‘old time’s sake, and heads out into the gathering dark. She sips her rum slowly, watching the old salts at the bar and the tired looking bar girls with a practiced eye. She sees the way one drunk’s coin pouch is slipping, little by little, onto the bench beside him, and catches the eye of one of the girls who seems to have noticed the same thing.

Emma looks down into her drink, and says nothing.

It’s not like she can judge, after all.

(She could. Should. She just doesn’t know how.)

When Killian returns he doesn’t sneak in, nor does he storm the place with weapons drawn, and although she’s not really an expert on the details of how one commandeers a pirate ship, she’s reasonably sure it doesn’t involve enlisting a little old lady carrying a brown package tied tight with fraying string.

“Here she is,” he says, gesturing widely with his arm to where Emma pauses, halfway through rising from the table, “Princess Emma of the Enchanted Forest!”

The drunken man belches loudly.

There’s a moment of silence, and then the bar girl who had been eyeing the coin purse bolts for the back room as if Hades himself is at her heels. Most of the patrons turn to stare at her with cautious, rheumy eyes, but the old woman with Killian looks at her as though she’s the answer to all of her dreams come true.

“Your Majesty,” she says with an arthritic curtsy. “I’ve waited many years for this.”

“Yeah?” says Emma. “Welcome to the club.”

The woman dodders over to the table, Killian following her with a twinkle in his eye that puts Emma immediately on edge.

“It’s not a crown, is it?” she asks, as the woman reverently lays the package down before her. “I’m not sure I’m a fan of crowns.”

“Really? You stole enough,” grumbles Killian good-naturedly, and she shushes him harshly.

“Ixnay on the robbery, okay?”

“But it’s how we met!” he says, all mock offense, and she barely resists the urge to stick her tongue out at him.

“You’re just like your parents were,” sighs the old lady, tears shimmering at the corners of her eyes. “It’s like seeing them reborn.” She looks at Killian, and the corner of her mouth twitches slightly. “If a little… rougher around the edges.”

Emma sits back down hard enough to send her ale slopping over the rim of her mug.

“You knew my parents?”

“Very well,” the woman smiles. “You look very like both of them you know.”

“What were they like?” It comes out a little breathless, but she can hardly help it, leaning forward as if the woman’s words might somehow disappear before she can hear them.

“Brave,” says the woman, her tears threatening to fall. “So brave. And good. Good and kind, and oh sweet girl, they loved you so very much.”

“Really?”

It’s a child’s voice, a child’s plea really, and the woman leans over the table to take Emma’s hands in her own wizened ones.

“Really.”

“She said they were still alive,” Emma says, squeezing as tight as she dares. “Do you believe that?”

The old woman shakes her head, but she’s smiling nonetheless.

“I think if you believe that, it’s all that counts. Your mother taught me that. To have hope.”

She nudges the package forward with their joined hands.

“Well, open it dear. The tide is in and time’s wasting.”

Emma struggles slightly with the strings, the knot worn tight with time, but eventually the packaging falls open to reveal an old piece of fabric. She pulls it free and watches as it spills over the table, slightly singed at one edge, but still recognizable.

“A flag?”

“Your flag,” the woman says. “To fly from the ship your companion just purchased. A Royal standard.”

Emma gapes.

“You purchased a ship?”

“It’s a day for firsts,” Killian says, and scratches behind his ear with his hook.

“Thank you,” she breathes, “how can I ever repay you - ” She grimaces slightly. “I’m sorry, your name is?”

“Granny,” says the old woman. “At least, that’s what your mother called me.”

“Granny,” repeats Emma, her vision blurring. “Thank you Granny.”

“No,” Granny says with a final squeeze of Emma’s fingers. “Thank you.”

She nods once to Killian, then tilts her head at the half empty flagon.

“Of course if you’re not going to finish that?”

Emma pushes it towards her, tucking the flag up under her arm as she does so.

“No,” she says. “It’s all yours. We have somewhere to be, right Killian?”

“Your Majesty,” he says with a bow, and reaches out so that she can place her hand in his. “Your kingdom awaits.”

–

They sail through the night on the small sloop, Killian at the helm focused on the stars, and Emma at the bow, her knees tucked under her as she faces into the wind, the Royal standard flying above them both.

Sunrise finds them close-hauled and bobbing gently into the mouth of a bay, the tide carrying them where the winds will not. The first pink rays catch the edges of a high promontory that reaches out like a long finger, and, at its tip, glowing golden as Emma’s hair -

Home.

“It’s beautiful,” she gasps, leaning forward over the bowspit for a better view of the grey-gold castle.

Killian ties the helm in place and comes to stand beside her, his hook hovering over her back as though he’s worried she might fall overboard in her excitement.

“Aye,” he says, and when she turns her face to him he only has eyes for her. “That it is.”

“I meant the castle,” she teases, standing upright so that he can wrap his arms around her, his warmth soothing the ache in her muscles from a long night’s watchfulness.

“Oh, well that has its appeal too I suppose,” he says, before pressing a kiss to the delicate skin beneath her ear. “I think I’ve the better treasure, though. Don’t you?”

(She thinks she does, actually. A treasure made of leather and sin and devotion. But she says nothing, just hums as he works his kisses down her neck, and wonders when the words will come.)

They drop anchor as the sun reaches its midpoint, the royal dock overgrown and storm battered but still recognizable by the few long faded tattered rags fluttering from sagging flagpoles, the scorched stonework of the castle’s outer walls rising up alongside.

“Home sweet home,” says Emma, rubbing her hands over her arms in the stiff breeze. “Looks cosy.”

Killian leans back, looking up to the tumbledown ramparts with his hand tucked into his belt.

“Could use a lick of lime I expect,” he says brightly. “But it’s an improvement on a tree trunk.”

Emma scowls and swats at his arm.

“I liked my tree trunk,” she hisses.

“As did I,” he agrees. “Looked lovely from my net, but you can’t deny there’s something to be said for a roof.”

“And a bed,” she says without thinking, and he hums lowly.

“Now that we _can_ agree on.”

–

Pinocchio must have had more difficulty convincing people into a life of Royal servitude than he’d expected, or the winds must have been to their benefit, because the castle is empty apart from the two of them and a family of feral cats who watch them with glinting eyes from darkened doorways.

There’s a pile of rubble where the throne room once stood, and Emma spends a long time - too long really - staring at the broken splinters of wood that were once her parents’ council’s chairs. At the bleached white bones without names.

As they explore further they discover a beautiful library - dusty and damp, but intact - and Killian spends almost an hour lovingly stacking a fire in the grate while she watches from a moth eaten sofa until the flames spark and bring the room to life along with them. He turns to her with pride written in all the shadows on his face, and when she whispers _perfect_ against his lips, it’s not the room that she’s referring to.

They spread the food they’ve carried from the villagers out on her cloak in the room that was once a royal kitchen and wipe cobwebs from silver cutlery. Emma curls into Killian’s embrace as he feeds her grapes, the juice running down her chin as she laughs, and the echoes bounce off the old stone walls, the castle itself seeming to laugh right along with her

She feels like she’s been waiting her whole life for this - not the castle, not the crown, those she could have lived without - but for wide blue eyes and a ridiculous grin as he tosses a grape up into the air and catches it in his mouth. For someone who loves her. For someone she loves.

Before the sun dips below the horizon, she knows she’s not waiting any longer.

She leaves him examining the spines of the books in the library and heads up the most intact staircase she can find, on a mission to find a bed that’s not been already reserved by a cat and her kittens.

Her eye is immediately caught by a door that stands ajar at one end of the corridor, the setting sun throwing an arrow of light along the flagstones, and tempting her to peek beyond it.

The room is dusty and battered, but was clearly once grand. An upturned cradle lies at its centre, toys scattered across the floor and on every surface, and she knows that when she closes the door - her heart pounding and her eyes hot - she closes it forever.

Somethings can never be recovered, after all.

There are plenty of beds to be found elsewhere. Beds full of mewling kittens and beds full of bones, beds sunken and stinking from damp and mold. One, four-posted and grand, is covered with silken sheets that are stained red-brown with old blood, the remains of what was once a man lying ragged and mildewed at its foot.

They don’t exactly scream romance, or a peaceful night’s sleep.

Killian laughs at her pout when she tells him, dropping a kiss to her forehead and swearing solemnly that he doesn’t need a bed, _just you, Swan. That’s all._

He sweeps her off her feet, dropping her on the couch and then trying hard not to cough as clouds of dust rise up around them, Emma’s giggles becoming almost hysterical as it settles in his beard.

“Very distinguished,” she sniggers. “How old are you again?”

“Old enough,” he says, tapping his hook against his lips as he considers her. “Now stay put.”

“ _Not_ very romantic,” Emma snorts, crossing her arms over her chest.

“ _Not_ finished,” he says with a wink, and sweeps out of the library, with a final warning wag of his finger. “Stay

She huffs, but stays put, watching the lazy whirl of the dust through the air and allowing the crackling fire to soothe her still ragged nerves.

Occasionally she hears an oath muffled by distance, and once she sits up, alarmed by a terrible clatter coming from somewhere above her head, but mainly she just seems to drift - warm and hazy - until her eyelids grow heavy, the hiss of the fire playing like a whisper through her dreams.

_Emma, Emma, Emma._

“Emma?”

She jerks awake, her hand already going for her knife, her bleary eyes taking a moment to recognise Killian’s silhouette without the bulk of his coat.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly, kneeling beside her. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Yes you did,” she yawns, plucking at the edge of his shirt. “You did it on purpose.”

“All right,” he says, his teeth flashing white in the dying firelight. “Maybe I did.”

“Hmmm,” she sighs, shuffling slightly towards the edge of the couch until her nose is almost pressed against the thin fabric of his shirt, her breath stirring the hairs beneath the open buttons. “Wonder why.”

“A princess shouldn’t sleep on an old moth eaten couch,” he says, curling a lock of hair around his hook and tugging lightly. “So instead -”

She hooks a finger under the next button on his shirt and pops it free, pressing her lips to the freshly exposed skin.

“Instead?”

She feels the vibration of his sigh under her lips as she works her way to the next button.

“I thought you were tired,” he mutters as she flutters kisses over his navel, her fingers tangling in the laces of his leathers.

“Second wind,” she counters, looking up at him through her lashes as she works at the knot. “You were gone a while.”

“I was busy,” he grunts, his hips canting forward. “Creating a bedroom fit for a princess.”

She pauses, tapping her fingers against the hard ridge of him where he strains against the leather.

“I think you like that.”

“Like what?”

“The princess thing.”

He smiles down at her, his face softer than she might have expected considering the heat of his arousal against her hand.

“Do you know,” he says, his palm against her cheek and his hook in her hair. “I suspect it’s more the Emma thing.”

“You’re making it difficult to seduce you you know,” she huffs, leaning into his touch. “Getting all soppy on me.”

“My apologies, Swan,” he says with a grin. “Please, don’t let me stop you.”

She leans back against the sofa, lifting her arms above her head as she stretches languidly, and quirks an eyebrow at him.

“I don’t know, maybe I _am_ too tired.”

Killian doesn’t seem to take the bait, instead still watching her with those too soft eyes.

“How about you let me take you to bed then, hmm? Perhaps you can consider your next move from a position of comfort.”

“Sounds wild,” she scoffs.

His lips twitch.

“Sounds like _you’ve_ got a - how did you say - _pirate_ thing.”

“Maybe I have,” she drawls, biting down on her lower lip as she loosens the stays of her corset to expose the rise of her breasts. “Want to find out?”

“Maybe,” he says, reaching to catch hold of her wrists so that he can pull her back to the edge of the seat. “But right now, there’s one thing I really would like to discover.”

“Oh?”

He tugs a little more firmly so that she rises to her feet, the loose halve of her corset falling away and leaving her in only her chemise and skirts, the heat of his body through the thin material sending warmth flooding through her as he presses her into his chest.

“Trust me?” he asks.

It’s never in doubt. Not when he wraps a piece of cloth around her eyes, nor as he leads her through the hallways of the castle, up a flight of stairs and down another, his hands steady and sure on hers whenever she threatens to stumble.

Finally they stop, Emma bumping into Killian’s back. The room is warm after the chill of the journey, the scent of candle wax strong in the air, and when Killian steps away the draft of the door being shut sends shivers down her spine.

“Scared?” he asks, the amusement in his voice laced with something darker, something that sets goosebumps shouting across her skin for more reasons than just the chill.

“Hardly,” she answers, “now can I take this thing off or - _hey_!”

She’s briefly weightless, flailing through the air, magic sparking through her blood like panic, and then she lands on something soft, her undignified squawk almost muffled by Killian’s chuckle.

“I’m sorry,” he sniggers against her ear as he tugs at her blindfold. “I couldn’t resist. Pirate, see.”

She blinks against the soft glow of candlelight as her vision is restored, Killian’s flushed, happy face hovering over her own as he kneels above her.

“You,” she says, “are an asshole.”

With only two swift moves she flips them so that he’s lying, pink and breathless, on the feather bed he’s somehow procured, while she sits back on her haunches, his thighs trapped between her own.

“Aye,” he says, with a lightness she barely recognizes him capable of, his smile making him look years younger as he lifts his hand and hook to rest them behind his head. “I dare say you like it.”

She leans forward, resting her thumbs on his cheeks as she brushes her lips oh-so-lightly against his, her next words barely a breath between them.

“I dare say I do.”

They’re not the words he truly wants to hear, nor the ones she can feel lying heavy on the tip of her tongue, but he surges up to taste them nonetheless, his mouth hot and certain as he draws out the words she cannot say, the truth of her feelings for him stuttering out in a series of half choked moans as he cants his hips up to meet hers.

“Too many clothes,” she mutters into his collarbone. “Why are there always too many clothes?”

“Not this time,” he mutters, pushing the cotton of her chemise down her arms until it falls to her waist exposing her breasts to his hungry eyes.  

“So beautiful,” he groans as he reaches for her , but she stops him with a hand on his wrist, the other hovering over the straps that hold his hook in place.

“May I?” she asks gently, aware of the way his eyes widen and his breathing seems to speed up as she turns the brace gently and presses a kiss to the hook. “For the first time in probably both our lives, no one is out to get us. We don’t need this…”

He licks his lips, his skin a little paler than before, and winces slightly as she runs a finger around the braces edge.

“Swan I -”

“I’m not a princess,” she says. “And you’re not a pirate. Not any more, not right now. We’re just us, just you and me.”

“Us,” he says, a smile breaking over his face. “I like that word.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Me too. So, let me see you? Please?”

He nods shortly, and she concentrates on working the buckles loose, years of ocean air having stiffened them to the point where she wonders just how often he actually removes the thing.

“Alright?” she asks as the final one comes free.

He nods again, his gaze fixed on the way her fingers close around the leather as she pulls the brace gently towards herself. For her part, she watches his face, never letting herself waver even as she drops hook and brace to the floor with a resounding clunk and brings his wrist close to her body.

“Too many clothes,” she tells him again, taking hold of his hand and resting both against the exposed skin of her waist. “Help a girl out?”

The nervous expression disappears in a moment, replaced by a familiar smirk - the one he’d sent her over a tavern bench a lifetime ago, all swagger and promise (and by the gods can he keep a promise).

“With pleasure.”

It doesn’t take much, just the lifting of her hips as he works her skirts down her legs, and then she’s over him again, leaning down to run damp kisses against the scars on his chest, her hands sliding lower until he’s the one squirming out of his trousers, kicking them off the end of the bed as he rises up to crush his lips against hers.

She grabs at his shoulders as he moves his mouth lower to lavishes kisses on her throat, his teeth nipping at her collarbone and then lower, lower until she’s keening against him as he turns his attentions to her breasts, his hand and wrist pressing her down until she’s practically grinding herself against his heat, tossing her head back so that he can draw more of her nipple into his mouth, her body straining towards him.

“I’ve dreamed of this,” he rasps against her damp skin. “Ever since you came back to my ship that first time, it’s always been you.”

She mumbles something that’s lost to a gasp as he slides his hand between them, making her nerves sing s though she’s an instrument he’s been playing all his life.

“The way you feel,” he sighs, rolling her clit between his fingers until she whimpers. “The way you taste.”

And then it’s her turn to be on her back, taking great gulps of air as he throws her legs over his shoulders and plunges his head between her thighs.

It’s all she can do to hold on, her hands fisting in his hair as he winds her higher and tighter until her vision bursts white behind her closed eyelids, pleasure flooding through her in waves as he laps and sucks like a starving man, the crook of his fingers inside her almost enough to make her see stars, but that highest peak is just out of reach, her body arching off the bed as she strains toward it, her thighs trembling around his ears.

“Please,” she begs, hardly sure what it is she’s asking for but just knowing that she needs it - that she needs _him_ \- heavy and hard and hers all hers. “Killian _please_.”

_I love you I love you I -_

And then he rises up her body, his mouth bruising and tart as he kisses her, and slides slowly, perfectly, _home_.

_I love you_.

–

She’s settled into the afterglow before she realizes they’re in some sort of tower room, the stone walls bare of any decoration save for the flickering shadows cast by the candlelight, and the steady glow of the dying fire. There’s a great arched window on the wall opposite the foot of their bed, and of they weren’t so high up - so high up that she can see the boat they arrived in as a mere speck against the silver-black sea - she might be self-conscious about lying here clothing in nothing but moonlight and shadow, her head pillowed on Killian’s chest while the waves crash against the rocks below.

She isn’t.

They lie in silence for a while, Emma content to count the beats of his heart under her ear and run gentle fingers over the scarring at his wrist. Killian lets her, only moving to toss the crumpled sheet over their entwined legs when the cool night breezes make her shiver, and then settling back, pulling her tighter against him as he does so.

Maybe it’s the need she feels in him then - the slight uptick of his heart rate, the shudder in his breathing as he presses his nose into her hair - or maybe it’s the wind picking up and sending the candles stuttering with the sound of the ocean’s displeasure, but her contentment is short lived.

“When will you leave?” she asks, her fingers stilling against the worst of the marks, the scarring much bolder in the struggling light.

He doesn’t move to sit up, but she feels the tension in his body, the way he holds his breath before he answers.

“Excuse me?”

“To go back to sea,” she says.

The wind howls, and the last of the candles gives up in the face of its wrath. Killian shifts himself and lifts her chin, forcing her to attempt to make out his expression in the pale moonlight.

_He looks sad_ , she thinks. She thinks maybe he always has, somewhere beneath the leather and swagger. Somewhere beyond the anger and flirtation.

It dawns on her that she’s not the only one exposed tonight.

“What on earth makes you think I’d do that?”

“But you said -” she starts, then pauses, wracking her brain for what he’d said that made her think he planned to leave. Something on that first night perhaps? When he was freshly betrayed and they were freshly lost?

(Or found.)

He stares at her, and she realises that it’s not unhappiness written in the shadow at his jaw or the quirk of his brow.

The bastard’s trying not to laugh.

“Emma,” he says in that gentle tone he seems to save for when he thinks she’s ridiculous. “What possible reason could I have to leave?”

She doesn’t know how to answer that, her only reference a lifetime of reasons she was left.

“But the sea, your ship, your _crew_ , don’t you have to keelhaul them or something?”

He hums and nods, pouting slightly as if considering the idea, but his hand is traveling down her side, his fingers splaying against her hip as he sits up, adjusting her on his lap so that she can wrap her legs around his back. The sheets fall away again, but she barely notices, not when he’s stoking the fire within her all over again with tender touches and his lips at her ear.

“The thought is tempting, but I have a better proposition.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“It involves a castle, a princess and a _dastardly_ pirate. I think you’ll quite enjoy it.”

“You think?”

“Oh darling, I _know_.”

\--

FIN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just the epilogue to go guys. Thank you so much to everyone who has supported this story. It, and you, mean the world to me. Thank you.


End file.
